I Interview Playwrights Part 189: Gregory Moss

photo: peter bellamy

Gregory Moss

Hometown: Newburyport MA.

Current Town: No fixed address.

Q:  Tell me about your play coming up this fall.

A:  There’s two coming up, both directed by the fantastically skilled Ms. Sarah Benson.

The first is called Orange, Hat & Grace which will be at Soho Rep in September. It’s about a older woman sorting out her biography, putting her house in order as she approaches the end of her life - doing some imaginative gymnastics to come up with a narrative, a version of her life that she can be at peace with. I don’t want to be coy about it, but, despite the weight of that description, it’s actually pretty funny and lively. I wrote a part for Matt Maher in the play, because I think he’s fantastic, and we were lucky enough to get him for the production.

The other will be at Woolly Mammoth in DC in November, and that one’s called House of Gold. House of Gold is a play about JonBenét Ramsey in the underworld.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  Lots of fun things – a loose adaptation of Marivaux’s La Dispute, the first draft of which is just about done; a play for children called Benny Glasgow: The Worst Kid Alive! which is a play about the worst kid alive; and a kind of ungainly, research-heavy project, about the rise and fall of Hippie utopianism, 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, the pill, Karen Carpenter, Patty Hearst, Charlie Manson and the economy of hitchhiking in America. Cultural history recast as a kind of road movie/afterschool special…we’ll see how that goes…

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

A:  What comes to mind is, my parents had this Emmet Kelly doll up in the attic. When I was a kid. Emmett Kelly was the archetypal sad hobo clown, and this doll scared the shit out of me. At night, I was certain I heard it, up in the attic, moving around, pushing cardboard boxes out of the way so he could get out, come down stairs, and kill me. This nightly anxiety sparked a deep seated fear of clowns, dolls and ventriloquist dummies. Then, in 2008, for a class at Brown, I got a ventriloquist dummy, over the internet. I learned how to throw my voice a bit, and made up some routines to perform with the dummy, who I named Andy. I started sleeping in the same room with him, leaving him seated on my dresser, facing my direction, so I would see him as I fell asleep, and when I woke up in the morning. That’s the shape of it, how I write, pretty much.

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

A:  I wouldn’t change anything. I think we finally got it exactly right.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  For playwrights, Wallace Shawn, Maria Irene Fornes, and Anton Chekhov are my gods. I love Paula Vogel, too, of course…a bunch of Davids - David Greenspan, David Adjmi and David Hancock. Nicky Silver’s Pterodactyls was a big influence early on, as was Charles Busch.

Closer to home are my immediate mentors and peers – Bonnie Metzgar, Ann Marie Healy, Dan LeFranc, and Cory Hinkle.

I have a closeted and increasingly grudging respect for David Mamet, though as he enters his sunset years he’s become the abusive father of the American theater.

My favorite artist, though, who I look to for a kind of blue print as to what an artist’s life should be like, is Lou Reed. Not cause I like everything he’s done – I don’t – but he’s consistently changed up his process and approach, with every project. He works in interstitial areas - queer and straight, blunt and oblique, high brow and low, street and academic, obscure and populist, spiritual and obscene. He’s hugely prolific, and wildly inconsistent. He’s built up and then blown his reputation over and over again, and I like that, that someone’s willing to completely fall on their face every time out in order to follow through on a creative idea.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Weird plays. Voices that haven’t been completely retarded or neutralized by TV. Stuff that’s impossible. By which I mean, plays that take us somewhere that we could not visit except through means of this play. I can easily go over to my friends house, hang out in his kitchen, watch his mom and dad fight, etc. etc. etc. It’s actually less interesting on stage than it is in real life. It’s like people who like to play race car video games, or create online identities that are just as boring as their real life identities. People who go to plays to check out the furniture. I like plays that address real human conundrums – not total abstraction - but I like to see it done in an idiosyncratic and imaginative way.

Gatz does this, somehow, and Telethon last summer did it, and Sleep No More did it at the ART last fall, all in very different ways. It’s not about genre – I’ll go see any kind of play – it’s more about creating a unique, unsummarizible event that has some lingering human fingerprints on it.

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

A:  Over and above technique, which is teachable and learnable, all you’ve got as a writer is your unique chemistry and point of view. It doesn’t matter if you like it, if you think it’s good or bad, or how it compares to what anyone else is doing – this way of processing the world and putting it into writing is YOURS and you’re stuck with it (or blessed with it). The playwright you are is already decided. So, rather than bemoaning your shortcomings, spend your time working on finding better ways to value, excavate, and generously present, what you’ve already got. Be rigorous, be disciplined, follow through.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Orange, Hat and Grace previews at Soho Rep September 16, opens September 23.
House of Gold opens November 1 at Woolly Mammoth.

I think people should also go see the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks shows - they look great. And Madeline George’s 13 P show, The Zero Hour – go see that too.

I Interview Playwrights Part 188: Hannah Bos

Hannah Bos

Hometown: Evanston, IL

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  Tell me about Buddy Cop 2.

A:  Buddy Cop 2 is the third play in our Americana Trilogy but sort of the second play in our architecture trilogy and the first play in our actors getting haircuts for roles trilogy and….

The play is about racquetball, cops and Christmas.

Q:  What is the process in which you and Paul write together?

A:  Paul and I write plays together and it’s horrible. He talks down to me because I’m a woman and because I’m shorter than him. Just kidding.

We try to write plays we would want to see. We start with the world of the play and that comes usually from a fable, idea, object or whatever. We generate the actual text on our own or in the same room and often even sitting next to each other at the same computer. We laugh a lot. That is just part of our development because we also have the luxury of then bringing the text to Oliver Butler our director and test driving material and then going back and changing lots of things. Paul and I are also performers so we think a lot about characters from a personal angle.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just finished preparing our script “You’re Welcome: A Cycle of Bad Plays” which will be published soon by Playscripts. I’m also finishing my first screenplay and working on the start of the next Debate Society play.

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

A:  I grew up in my mom’s antique store in Evanston, Illinois. I think that has had a huge influence on my life. Even as a really little girl my mom would let me do the shop’s window so I could set up a little scene with a theme like a prairie life or for Halloween I would put broken doll parts into jars and make tiny nooses. I guess the theme of that window would be murder. I should also mention I would sometimes stand in the window like a mannequin for long periods of time.

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

A: I like how Russian audiences treat going to the theater. It’s cheap and more like a highly respected sport. People are on the edges of their seats and know all the players.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Cherry Jones. I got to work with her once in a play. Jessica Thebus a wonderful director in Chicago is a hero of mine as well as Joyce Piven from the Piven Theater Workshop. Both of them taught me when I was growing up.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like new plays. I like things that give me chills. That’s usually the barometer for me. I also like Steppenwolf, The Piven Theater Workshop and Annie Baker.

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

A:  Write as much as you can. Produce your own work and meet young excited directors.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come see Buddy Cop 2

www.thedebatesociety.org

www.hannahbos.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 187: Steven Levenson

Steven Levenson

Hometown: Bethesda, Maryland

Current Town: Brooklyn, New York

Q:  Tell me about Seven Minutes in Heaven.

A:  Seven Minutes In Heaven began a little over a year ago as a conversation between director Adrienne Campbell-Holt and me. Adrienne came to me in the spring of 2009 and asked if I wanted to work on something together. The only ideas she had in mind were that it would somehow involve both dance and the eighties prom classic “Forever Young” by Alphaville, and it would not be a play, strictly speaking. I was in the midst of writing first drafts of two commissions, and I was feeling a bit terrified and overwhelmed by the need to make these Important Plays, Theater with a capital T, that sort of thing; the idea of working on something fun and quick and with minimal pressure sounded like an incredible gift. In figuring out what we wanted to do, and guided by those haunting synths of Alphaville, Adrienne and I soon landed on our shared obsession with adolescence, the dizzying commingling of euphoria and dread that suffuses that strange almost-decade tucked somewhere between 12 and 20. We wanted to make something that would capture the feeling of these years in a way that was kinetic and theatrical and sad and strange.

From these initial conversations, what has since emerged in the last year and change is Seven Minutes In Heaven, which is what I guess you could call a sort-of play. It tells the very loose story of a freshman party in 1995 and, while it happens more or less in real time, it also pushes against the constraints of naturalism and occasionally breaks off into something very different. It has a central narrative, recognizable characters, conflict, and all those good things, but at the same time it sacrifices the sense of completeness and coherence of traditional dramatic structure in favor of more of a snapshot approach. The intention—which hopefully our production achieves—is to get at the core feeling inside the experience of being a teenager, to allow the audience directly into that experience.

For me, what is so compelling about teenagers and stories about teenagers is the fact that the stakes at which they live their lives could not be higher. It’s like life in a foxhole with enemy artillery exploding all around you. Every phone call, every run-in in the hallway can mean life or death. But then at the same time, looking back at our own adolescence, we realize just how low the stakes actually were. In this disconnect between the characters’ feelings and our understanding of their feelings, there’s a lot of room obviously for humor and irony. But there’s also, I think, a tremendous sadness and tenderness and even beauty in the sheer ephemerality of it all—the knowledge that the people we once were, the people we once loved, the feelings we once felt to the deepest core of ourselves—all of it vanishes, time heals everything. And that’s at once incredibly comforting and incredibly painful.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I’m working on a few commissions, in varying stages of unfinished, for Roundabout, Lincoln Center, and Ars Nova. Also I’ve been teaching intermittently at a private school in Connecticut, Greenwich Academy, where I’ve done some workshops in playwriting. They commissioned me to write a play a few months ago for their students to perform this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The play I’ve written is called Retreat, and it’s about the birth of psychoanalysis in turn-of-the-century America. The commission has been a great and unusual opportunity, in that I had to write at least 8 characters, a number usually prohibitively high in New York theater. I have 11 right now. I had a reading of it at MTC for their Seven @ Seven series a few weeks ago, and I have to say it was pretty thrilling to walk into a room of 11 actors. I also just finished my first television pilot, which I co-wrote with Evan Cabnet.

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 twelve I rented the movie The Godfather, which was a coup in and of itself, as I spent an inordinate amount of time in my youth pleading with my parents to let me watch R-rated movies. I became immediately, irrevocably obsessed with all things Mafia-related, and from The Godfather I proceeded to watch every single movie even tangentially connected to Italian-American organized crime. From movies, it went to books, like Sammy “the Bull” Gravano’s memoirs, which I owned in hardcover and may or may not have bought the day it was released. I started to dress like Robert DeNiro in Goodfellas, which is to say I mostly resembled a Florida retiree, with garish floral Hawaiian shirts, open-necked velour zip-ups (I’m sadly not kidding), and a chunky gold Jewish star necklace, which I secretly wished was a crucifix. When my family visited New York, I begged my parents, to no avail, to take my siblings and me to overpriced Spark’s Steakhouse in Midtown, because this was the spot where John Gotti had former Gambino boss Paul Castellano bumped off, natch. I should also add that around this time I wrote a “novella,” more accurately described as a 15-page collection of bad words and machine guns, called Decappa, about—what else?—a mob boss down on his luck and hungry for revenge.

Cut to a year or so later, and I could not care less about the Mafia. My new obsession was, and I cringe when I write this I assure you: Buddhism (and yes, ok, maybe also Beat poetry). And the cycle began once again: I read all the books, watched all the movies, burned incense in my bedroom, meditated on my own mortality, the works. This proclivity to become obsessed with something, the need to accrue an unnecessary, encyclopedic amount of knowledge on a given topic, to overdose on information—this is, I’ve begun to realize, how I write plays as well. I have to fall in love, immoderately, with an idea or an image or a character or preferably all three, and it’s this obsession, this infatuation that fuels the writing.

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

A:  It’s tricky because so many of the deficiencies in institutional theater today reflect, I think, much deeper problems in our society as a whole. Starting with the obvious, it’s criminal that artists don’t have health care—but it’s equally criminal for anyone not to have health care in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. We can then go on to lament the fact that so few artists can make a living doing what they do, but again we’re back at the larger problem of a country where wages for the vast majority of people have stagnated or declined in the last forty years. The thing that clearly looms over so many, if not all, issues in American theater today—from audience diversity to scarcity of production opportunities to the question of subsidiary rights—is funding, pure and simple. There’s just not enough money in theater and this reflects a society where the arts are not valued, where everything must be “monetized” to matter, where theaters have become—out of necessity—incredibly risk-averse, petrified of losing funding or subscribers or both. That’s why I can’t really get behind blaming the supposed fecklessness of theater producers, whom I think are actually on the whole far more adventurous and aesthetically ambitious than they’re generally given credit for. I wish I knew how to change all of this, but I will be the first to admit that I don’t. I do believe, though, that what we are looking at are systemic problems, deep-seated societal contradictions, and that we as theater artists need to be engaged with the world beyond us, because that’s where the real fight is going on. When state and local budgets for education, the arts, health care, childcare, etc. are being slashed nationwide, we as artists have a unique role to play in the overdue conversation of just what our society’s priorities are.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Paula Vogel, who took me to coffee my senior year of college, weeks before I was graduating with no idea what to do next, and told me over some Providence chai, “if you want to do this, you can.” Few words have had such an impact on my life. Paula is the most passionate, most determined and tireless advocate for new writers and new plays that I know, besides being a brilliant writer and the Platonic ideal of Teacher. Another hero is Caryl Churchill, who writes with such a simple, elegant theatricality, and whose work is always engaged seriously with the world without ever lapsing into agit-prop, and without ever losing a sense of wonder. Sarah Ruhl, whose plays first made me want to write plays. Also, just in general, I am constantly in awe of actors, who always humble me with their talent, their generosity, and their fearlessness.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I feel like so much media today is about tuning out, withdrawing into yourself. For instance, the idea of watching TV on your phone on the subway is still sort of staggering to me. Or I catch myself when I’m walking down the street and I absently put on my iPod; I’m neither fully listening to music nor fully walking down the street, I’m in this middle place where the only thing I’m really involved in is myself. I’m excited by theater that pulls me out of this tendency and forces me to be there, in this room, with these people around me, experiencing this thing together. You can’t curl up alone with your laptop and fall asleep while watching, say, an Adam Bock play, the way you can with even an excellent 30 Rock episode. There’s a sociologist named Bert States who wrote this phenomenal book about theater called Great Reckonings In Little Rooms, and I feel like that pretty much sums up what theater should be. I know that’s kind of a maddeningly broad definition, but I don’t know how else to encapsulate theater experiences as diverse as David Cromer’s Our Town, everything by Annie Baker, Young Jean Lee, Dan LeFranc, Jordan Harrison, Assassins, Pig Iron, and the list goes on and on.

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

A:  Write. Keep writing. Build your life so that you have time to write, and value that time. Take every free or cheap ticket offer you get, see as many plays as you can. Read plays. Read everything. Read fiction and poetry and philosophy and the newspaper and the backs of cereal boxes. Be attentive to the world. And be patient. Learn to appreciate the work itself and not the results. Patience, especially with yourself, is probably the hardest thing to learn. It’s something I for one wrestle with every day.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I can’t wait to see Dot by Kate E. Ryan at Clubbed Thumb this summer. Kim Rosenstock’s Tigers Be Still at Roundabout in the fall is going to be awesome. Amy Herzog’s After The Revolution is an amazing play that’s going to be at Playwrights Horizons next year. If you haven’t seen Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at the Public yet, you should do yourself a favor and get there. I’m also really excited to finally see Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz at The Public next season, as well as Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide To Capitalism And Socialism With a Key To The Scriptures. A new Tony Kushner play feels about as close to a Major Seismic Event as I can imagine in theater.

I Interview Playwrights Part 186: Molly Smith Metzler

Molly Smith Metzler

Hometown: Kingston, NY (in the Hudson Valley by Woodstock)

Current Town: Brooklyn Heights, NY

Q:  Tell me about the play you're taking to Chautauqua and The O’Neill this summer.

A:  Sure, it’s a comedy called CLOSE UP SPACE and it’s a father/daughter play. It’s set in a publishing house, which was fun for me to write because by day I’m an editor, so I got to put all the typographical proofreading symbols in my head to good use. (“Close up space” is actually an editing term that means exactly what it sounds like: get rid of the space and bring the two letters together). The play is about a widower and book editor (Paul), who is amazing with language but not so good with his eccentric daughter (Harper), who he sent to a far away boarding school years ago. In the play, Harper shows up unannounced at his office—having been expelled from school because she refuses to stop speaking Russian—and Paul has to find a way to communicate with her. It’s a comedy about loss and love and language and Russia and maybe even how we close up our spaces. I’m incredibly excited to work on it this summer, especially with two directors I admire so much: Ethan McSweeny at Chautauqua Theater Company and Sheryl Kaller at the O’Neill (with my friend Annie MacRae as dramaturg.)

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I just finished a new comedy at Juilliard—called ELEMENO PEA—that I’m excited to hear at Williamstown this summer (Friday @3 reading). It’s about a social worker from blue-collar Buffalo (Devon) who goes to Martha’s Vineyard to visit her little sister (Simone), who’s been working as a live-in assistant to one of New York’s wealthiest trophy wives (Michaela). This female triangle is the center of the play, which is set in a ludicrous beach estate that I’ve actually been to in real life (as “the help,” no less). The play’s about class, family, and the choices we make. I’ll be working on it at WTF with the wonderful Amanda Charlton, who directed the student workshop at Juilliard this spring. Really looking forward to that.

I’m also working on two new plays: one is about modern technology and is called BUTTDIAL. It’s obviously a very serious drama. The other is a wee embryo and an actual drama, I think.

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

A:  I grew up in one of those Royal Tenenbaum kind of houses, where everyone is creative and artistic and eccentric. We Metzler kids created our own theater troupe—the “Rainbow Riders”(get it? Because we rode the rainbow?)—and we wrote, produced, directed, designed and performed our plays for the neighborhood. There aren’t many parents who let their kids use the good silver for fight choreography, but ours did, and I’m still grateful. Also, I’m pretty sure I learned comic timing simply by listening to my brother and sister all these years. I am not funny. I repeat: I am not funny. But Blake Metzler and Kate Metzler are seriously the two most hilarious people on the planet. If you don’t believe me, come to my house for xmas. You’ll pee yourself laughing.

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

A:  How conservative it’s gotten! (See: Todd London’s book, Outrageous Fortune.)

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: 
Female: Marsha Norman.

Male: Chris Durang and Colin McKenna.

RIP: Chekhov.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Plays that tell a great story!!! Plays that make me forget that I’m hungry and tired and have a beeping blackberry in my bag and a dog to walk. Plays that make me sweat and listen. Plays that make time vanish.

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

A:  Go big or go home. Get involved. Go to everything. Find other theater artists, make friends, support them. Write about important and personal questions. And grad school can be a great thing for some people. I went to Boston University, Tisch and Juilliard and recommend all three.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Become a member of TCG today and subscribe to AMERICAN THEATRE magazine! (www.tcg.org)

Some dates:

CLOSE UP SPACE at Chautauqua Theater Company (NPW), directed by Ethan McSweeny July 1- 4

CLOSE UP SPACE at the O’Neill Theater Center, directed by Sheryl Kaller Wed July 21 & Thurs July 22

ELEMENO PEA at Williamstown Theatre Festival—Friday @3 Reading, directed by Amanda Charlton July 30

And a must see:

Sam Hunter’s magnificent play JACK’S PRECIOUS MOMENT, produced by P73 @ 59E59 Theater and directed by Kip Fagan, is running right now through mid June. Get thee to the show!!!

I Interview Playwrights Part 185: Matthew Lopez

Matthew Lopez

Hometown: Panama City, FL



Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q: Tell me about the play The Whipping Man.

A: The Whipping Man focuses on the period immediately following the surrender at Appomattox, which ended the Civil War and effectively freed all the rest of the slaves still being held in southern states. I’ve long been fascinated with the idea that history is made up of more than just great, calamitous events; it is also the quiet moments (which, in truth, are never all that quiet) between the big events in which life is allowed to return to normal. There was no event more calamitous in American history than the Civil War and slavery. How can you be a slave all your life and then suddenly be presented with freedom? How do you make that shift? Is it sudden or gradual? What if you were forced to make that shift in the presence of your former master? How do you react to him? Layered on top of these questions is the fact that Passover began the day after the surrender, which means that while American Jews were celebrating this ancient observance of the Exodus from Egypt, a new kind of exodus was happening around them. I imagined a Jewish slave owning family (such families did exist) and their slaves who have, over time, adopted the religion. Hopefully it causes audiences to question the meaning of freedom and personal responsibility, both in their own lives and as citizens.

The play started as a twenty minute one-act about ten years ago. It has since grown and developed over time to the play it is today. I’m very lucky it’s had so many lives over the years. It premiered in 2006 at Luna Stage in Montclair, NJ and has had several productions since. It’s currently being produced at the Old Globe in San Diego and is about to open at Barrington Stage in the Berkshires. On any given night between now and June 13, two very different casts in two very different productions are doing my play for two very different audiences. I'm a very lucky writer.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I was recently named Playwright-in-Residence at the Old Globe which includes a commission so I’m starting to think about what I’m going to write for them. I have a reading of my play Zoey’s Perfect Wedding at Ars Nova in July, directed by Stephen Brackett. In October, I’ll be doing a workshop of my play Tio Pepe for the Globe with Giovanna Sardelli, who directed The Whipping Man.

I’m also starting to work on a couple of musical projects, which is really exciting for me as I am such a musical theatre junkie. It’s like a tweaker getting to work in a meth lab. I can’t wait!



Q: You and I have the same agent. Isn't Seth the bomb?

Seth is not only the best agent in the business, he’s also the tallest, which is good because he can simply crush anyone who gets in your way.

Seriously, though, Seth has been my agent for almost four years and he is the author of so many wonderful opportunities for me. I’ve never had another agent but I cannot imagine one who works harder or cares more about his clients than Seth. (There…that ought to bump me up a few slots in the “favorite client” list. I’m gunning for Rajiv’s spot.)

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I don’t have a type of theatre I prefer over another. I just crave honesty in storytelling and character development. I simply want to believe what I’m being told. Even if it’s a lie, I want to believe it. When you work in the business, it’s often very difficult to turn the critical part of your brain off and simply enjoy the experience as an experience. Annie Baker allows me to do that and I am grateful to her for that. Her worlds are so whole and nourishing.

I also love theatre that is unafraid to be emotional and to illicit an emotional response. I love nothing more than to cry. I’m not talking about manipulation. That, I cannot stand, especially in theatre. But I love to feel as much as I love to think. I feel in some ways we’ve moved too far away from that, as if it were something to be afraid of. As if targeting emotion was a cynical endeavor. I expect theatre to be intelligent. Intelligence is sort of a given. I also want emotion, feeling. That’s difficult to do well, to do honestly. And that’s what excites me.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?


A: When I first moved to New York, I got a copy of the Theatrical Index and I wrote a letter to everyone who was listed in it, offering myself up as an unpaid intern, a barely-paid assistant, whatever. I was willing to sell candy in the lobby if it meant working in theatre. I must have sent close to 150 letters. Only one person responded: Hal Prince. Not only did he respond, he invited me to meet with him in his office. I, of course, leapt at the offer. We met for an hour (!) and he asked me what I wanted to do with my career and gave me a ridiculous amount of sage advice. He then hooked me up with a job assisting Terrence McNally on a two-week workshop of the musical he wrote with Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, A Man of No Importance. I learned more in those two weeks than I had in all my time in New York up until then. In exchange for my services, Terrence agreed to read one of my plays. That was the bargain we struck. I remember hand-delivering it to his doorman down on lower 5th Avenue, very nervous. A few days later, I got a voicemail from him saying, “I read your play. I think it’s quite impressive. Congratulations, Matthew. You are a real writer.” That play eventually became The Whipping Man.

I have a lot of theatrical heroes, most of whom you wouldn’t be surprised to hear on any playwright’s list. But the generosity of time and spirit that Hal Prince, Terrence McNally, Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Joe Mantello showed to me during that period made them my heroes.

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

A: Get a copy of the Theatrical Index. Write 150 letters.



Q: Plugs, please:

A: The Whipping Man is currently running at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego (http://www.theoldglobe.org/tickets/production.aspx?PID=7522) and Barrington Stage (http://www.barringtonstageco.org/currentseason/index-detail.php?record=84), both running until June 13.

I Interview Playwrights Part 184: Lee Blessing

Lee Blessing

Hometown:   Minneapolis.

Current Town: Brooklyn.


Q:  Tell me about When We Go Upon The Sea.

A:  When We Go Upon the Sea is a funny play about shame. It's set slightly in the future, on the night before George W. Bush goes on trial in The Hague for acts committed while he was the President. So it's speculative as well, of course. It doesn't suggest that anything like this will happen necessarily, but it helps us contemplate our own impulses to punish the man we twice elected to lead our nation. Oh--and it's a party as well. So bring your party hats.


Q:  What else are you working on?

A:   I'm working on a couple of plays. Private projects. Also a spec screenplay. Nothing I can talk about at the moment--or ever sell, probably.


Q:  You are the head of the Rutgers Grad Playwriting Program.  What can a playwright who gets into that program expect?

A:   They can expect what incoming MFA playwriting candidates generally can expect: a chance to work for three years in a concentrated way on their writing. They'll be working very directly with me, so that's something they have to know they want to do. At Mason Gross School of the Arts, they also can expect three productions in three years, the final one a full production on the Rutgers mainstage--that's a very distinctive feature of our particular program.


Q:  According to Wikipedia, you are married to Melanie Marnich.  I am also married to another playwright.  Do you have any advice for playwright couples?

A:  Don't write together. Unless you do write together. If you do happen to marry another playwright, make sure they're as astoundingly talented as Melanie. It makes life much easier. Oh, and Wikipedia? It's never wrong.
 Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:   More space between the seats. Oh, and theatres which commission plays in order to actually produce them (as opposed to theatres which commission plays just to look good on grant reports).


Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:   I don't think of theatrical types as heroes. I prefer to think of them as unsettling.


Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:   Theatre which can genuinely make me think and feel--which is to say, theatre which most audiences find off-putting.


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

A:   Write a hit play that helps you get into television. Stay in television if you can. But if you must keep writing plays, write with far more ambition than your audience typically has. Write characters who are at least as smart as you are. Never have a character make a dumb decision (i.e., one that you wouldn't make) just to further your plot. Don't write passive central characters. That about covers it.


Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  No plugs, just outlets.