I Interview Playwrights Part 193: Christine Evans

Christine Evans

Hometown: Sydney, Australia

Current Town:Providence, RI

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  THE UNDERPASS-- a live-virtual script about a haunted rehabilitation center. It's a collaboration with a director and interactive media designer.

Q:  Tell me about Trojan Barbie.

A:  Basically it collides the storyline of the Euripides' play with the misadventures of a lost tourist in contemporary Troy, who repairs dolls. There's a kind of double-vision throughout the play between dolls (the tourist view of other people's wars) and corpses, which is inspired by seeing the creepy images of doll repair shops online--they look so much like the bodies of war dead in those news photographs. I wanted to theatricalize the experience of enforced voyeurism of other's suffering through a tourist's journey, and also suggest that things connect up on levels that are hard to perceive-- that unmourned histories return in other guises. And of course-- to play with dolls. It's a curious phenomenon that most little girls dismember their Barbies--so my version of Polyxena (Polly X) is herself an artist who makes sculptures from smashed up dolls and war detritus.

It premiered at the A.R.T. last Spring and had a show at the University of New Hampshire this Spring--next year it premieres in the U.K at Playbox Theatre in Warwick, then London.

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 3 different countries, always slightly out of joint with where I was. As a little girl in England (country #1), the story was that Australia was "really" home (my parents were expats). So I learned the exile's longing and displacement in utero, I think. I went to nine different schools in England, New Zealand and Australia, and graduated from a very dysfunctional progressive high school at 16. I have always felt like the one herring that swims the opposite way from the school of fish.

I learned to read early and fell in love with Peter Pan at 4, which I took very seriously and read about 100 times. I ran away from home a lot in kindergarten and first grade, convinced that "second to the left and straight on til morning" would eventually lead me to Never-Never land. Kindly policemen brought me home, and I was expelled from my first school at age 5-- a recurring theme, as it turned out.

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

A:  Only one?? Well... I would call up Tinkerbell to reverse the relative representation of male to female playwrights and artistic directors for the next ten years, reverse the pay scales for primary creative artists (playwrights, actors, designers) and managers and interpreters (A.D.s; executive directors) and then see what happened. I would also require theatre critics to know something of the art form, and work at (say) the level of expertise of music reviewers or book reviewers, who are supposed to know MORE about the field than their audience, rather than do a faux populist read on what the dumbest (imaginary) person in the audience might think.

But less facetiously: I think the current model is broken, and that we need to move away from the "top down" model to more dispersed, collective, autonomous ways of making work. The buildings (literally and metaphorically) are crumbling; fear leaks out of their walls (the fear of fiscal collapse) and into programming. It is, however, assiduously kept off the stage which makes for anodyne programming and a dying audience. I see the most energy and hope in collective models where playwrights are players (in every sense). Otherwise, we're just making product for General Motors Theatre, Inc., based on an assembly line that's about to be remaindered. I think we need to go and find our people and work with them, and forget the gate-keepers if there isn't a sensibility fit there. That's what I've started doing and I am having vastly more fun, getting more work on, and finding passionate audiences. I don't think "home" has to be one place any more, and the internet has made that much more true.

I think there is a place for the "building home" and subscriber theatre, though, and it is in museum culture and should be funded as such. It would be sad if those skills and methods disappeared entirely. People need to know their heritage--If they really WERE museums, living museums, we might get better curation and more thoughtful, historically contextualized work-- Thinking of the Shakespeare's Globe in London, for example.

But really: I think my ur-point is Marxist: the means of production determines social (and artistic) relations, and for peculiar reasons to do with the Cold War and the McCarthy era and triumph of late-capitalism (at least til recently), this is a serious blind spot in American conversations about theatre. So we need to rethink the means of production and take responsibility for it and have say and control over that process as creative artists.

I totally cheated on this question; that's about 5 things.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Euripides, who wrote about slaves and women, and wrote (along with other Greek poets) so many versions of the same stories and characters. Caryl Churchill, who astonishes me with her range and concision and vision. I particularly love her more recent work-- Far Away and A Number and Seven Jewish Children. Bond, Pinter, Barker, Beckett--those guys. Sarah Kane. W. David Hancock who I think is deeply under-regarded in the American theatre-- an amazing writer whose version of the theatrical contract and whose love for working-class stories and modalities is unique. Judith Thompson; Daniel MacIvor. I love Forced Entertainment for the way they frame theatre as a game, a mess, an always-failing enterprise. Peter Brooks. And then just too many other playwrights to name--I have a love affair with Latino/a playwriting and have been astonished by Maria Irene Fornes and then Migdalia Cruz, Octavio Solis, Jose Rivera and others--and also love the lyric sweep and historical sensibility of Black playwrights Marcus Gardley and the early Suzan-Lori Parks. Botho Strauss for his Big and Little (Scenes)--the only play I'd ever read (back in the 90s) that placed a passive protagonist in the center of a social tragedy. I also have a deep fondness for Tenessee Williams and Thornton Wilder.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A;  I love theatre where the inside is bigger than the outside. A dream with a hard core of truth inside. That's a huge range really: a tight chamber play or a vast, sweeping imagistic explosion (from Far Away to Brook's Mahabarata). Work that has a forceful vision at its center, that takes you somewhere you didn't know you were going--and when you return, everything looks different. Theatre with a complex view of mimesis, one that knows the viewer changes the thing viewed. Theatre that isn't completed when the show ends, that haunts me when it's over. Theatre that has to be theatre, that engages the danger and folly of liveness. It can be Aristotelian in its arc and drive or fractal and polyphonic; I don't care as long as it's fired by the force of vision.

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

A:  Write every day and find your people. Do that first and keep doing it for as long as you write. Go and see everything. Find the joy in it, and if there is no joy, do something else with your life. Don't worry if it's all terrifying; it just is. If you would like to make a living, think long and hard about that. If you want to be A Writer more than you want to write, please do something else.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Its all just cooking away in the basement right now. I'm working on the second draft of The Underpass (my live-virtual collaborative piece) and scheduling workshops and an April showcase production for that. Starting a new chamber play for 3 women, Can't Complain, which I hope will be a comedy. Forthcoming publications: Trojan Barbie with Samuel French and an anthology of my war plays with No Passport Press, plus several pieces in Smith and Kraus' Best Women's Monologues of 2010 and Best Men's Monologues of 2010. And Alexis Clements and I are co-editing a two-volume anthology of plays from this year's Playwrights' Lab at the Women's Project, titled Out of Time and Place. Then the UK premiere of Trojan Barbie next year.  Updates on my website: www.christine-evans-playwright.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 192: Jon Tuttle

Jon Tuttle

Hometown: Salt Lake City, Utah. Go Utes.

Current town: Florence, SC.

Q:  Tell me please about Holy Ghost now at Theater of Note in LA.

A:  A very strong production--which actually just closed. It's about German (some Nazi) prisoners of war kept in a camp in SC--which actually happened. It's about the varous camps into which we separate ourselves according to nationality, race, religion and language, and how we are therefore not a melting pot at all. It's about the idea of "volk." It's about the limits of democracy. Structurally, it's a tricky piece because it has two protagonists, two plotlines, two separate resolutions. But NOTE pulled it off very, very well.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  My dead cat play: THE SWEET ABYSS, which is a woman’s spiral into debilitation grief following the death of her cat. It’s had one production at Trustus, my home theatre, and I was very pleased by the response, which was typically something like “my God, let me tell you about my Yorkie who died last March.”

Q:  Tell me about Trustus Theater. How long have you been involved with them?

A:  Trustus is a TCG theatre in Columbia. They’ve produced four of my plays, beginning with THE HAMMERSTONE back in 1994, after which I became Playwright in Residence and then Literary Manager. It’s been a terrific collaboration—really a dream come true for someone in my position, which was an unaffiliated playwright-wanna-be looking for an artistic home. The theatre’s about 25 years old now and still going strong. And it has a bar.

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

A:  Here’s one: a friend of mine, Jim, would spend all day under the hood of his Dodge Charger working on the engine, or working on the suspension, or adding headers or whatever. I mean, he’d spend all damned DAY under there. And I’d say, “man, it’s just a CAR.” So one day he comes over and finds me staring at my blank spiral notebook, because we didn’t have word processing back then. And he says, “man, it’s just a NOTEBOOK.” After that I shut my mouth about his car. Who knows why things call to you? We are all stories, trying to tell ourselves. He told his with his car. It’s who he was.

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

A:  I’m pretty old fashioned. I’m rooted in STORY. I’m a structural guy. A lot of new plays are like tone-poems or “experiences,” and frequently I just don’t GET them. There’s no THERE there. They are amorphous and inchoate and don’t get elbow-deep into anything. They just float there, like pretty balloons. And I ask myself: is that enough?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Arthur Miller. See? I’m a structuralist. Give me layers. David Mamet. Our Lord. But Adam Rapp’s use of language is irresistible, and so is Wendy Wasserstein’s wit. I once rejected Itamar Moses—but he took it well, wrote a nice letter back. I really do love his stuff, but it wasn’t “right for us” at Trustus.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Layers. Give me layers. Make me shut up all the long way home. Ambiguity. Give me some work to do. Don’t solve the problem for me. Show me the problem. Show me its complexities. Suggest an answer but don’t insist on it.

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

A:  Best two pieces of advice about writing I ever heard: Ethan Canin: “nobody ever writes a novel (or play). It’s too big. You can’t do it. You write a page, or a paragraph, then another, then another, or a chapter, or a scene, then a page—and you keep going until you say: ‘oh. This is what this means.’ Also: when it comes to marketing your stuff: it’s a smaller world than you think. Always always always be gracious and grateful. If an AD or Lit Man knows you’re an asshole, he won’t pay much attention to your stuff. And that’s fair.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Trustus. Theatre of NOTE. Reverie Productions in NYC. Good jumping off points for new playwrights. My wife Cheryl. Great woman. And join the Dramatists Guild, for God’s sake.

I Interview Playwrights Part 191: Nikole Beckwith

Nikole Beckwith

Hometown:  Newburyport Massachusetts

Current Town:  Brooklyn

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Well, I am working on my third full length play over at The Public, as a member of their Emerging Writers Group (which is an amazing amazing group, I feel very lucky) I'd tell you about the play but, I can never really talk about a play before it's done. I can say it's darker than my other two full lengths, in a good way. I can also say that half way through act one I realized it was partly somehow a response to Greg Moss' House of Gold, a play that I love and carry around with me (metaphorically, not in script form) which is happening at Wooly Mammoth in DC this November. You just interviewed him. I've known Greg more than half my life and his plays are like nothing else out there.

Also, I've been working on this comic strip project with The Civilians and WNYC. The Civilians have this incredible show, You Better Sit Down; Tales From My Parents' Divorce which I saw at Galapagos last November and fell in love with. In love, like I still swoon on and on about it as though I saw it just yesterday. They partnered with WNYC to open up the project into a kind of diologue with every and anybody about their own parents divorce and I contributed a comic strip for their museum of "contested objects" then both The Civilians and WNYC thought it'd be great if I did the whole shabang. So I did. I was schooled on the Civilians interview technique and recorded 6 hours of my parents over the phone. I transcribe those interviews in chunks and then figure out what the mini-story is and shape it into a dozen or so frames. I've made comic strips for years now, mostly just about my daily life and/or sad yet hilarious truths (if those things are different). I consider them my shortest plays. This is the first series where I can't take artistic liberties or re-invent anything. It's also the first series that is both not about me and is still about my life. I've felt like a private detective or an archiologist; trying to find out how something that doesn't exist anymore died in the first place. And what did it eat? I feel really lucky to get to be involved with a project I was so taken by and luckier still that I get to learn about these two people I was made by (even if that part is occasionally beyond overwhelming)

Q:  Can you tell me about the thing you're doing with the kids at Stella Adler?

A:  Yes! So this wonderful playwright Melissa Ross invented this program at Stella Adler where she gathers up some playwrights and has them commissioned to write short plays specifically for her advanced teen students. The writers show up and meet the students about a month before class starts, each kid gets up and tells a little about themselves and after that Melissa sends us our cast list and we have about a month to write a play specifically for them. Then Melissa works with the kids all summer directing them into production, then there's a show with all the plays. It's really great. I think it's so amazing for the kids to get that experience of working with text that was made just for them and an equally great catalyst for us playwrights to create something new. This is my second go around, last year I wrote a play about conjoined twins in the hospital after their separation surgery, called Connectivity. I adore the girls I wrote it for and I adore the play. It was a lovely experience for everyone, I am thrilled to do it again. I always write with actors in mind whether they ever know it or not. It helps me develop a more concrete image of the world. I think what melissa has done for the class is amazing; when I was a teen, I was relegated to working with very out-of-date "dramatic scenes" about what "teens" had to deal with in the seventies or what people in their seventies thought teens had to deal with in the 90's. Sometimes teenagers don't need to talk about eating disorders or 90210 style pregnancy scares, they can also talk about regular things. Like getting separated from their conjoined twin.

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

A:  Be warned: I never tell a short story. Ok, when I was in elementary school I decided the violin was my calling, I must have been 8, maybe 9? I convinced my parents to let me take violin as an afterschool elective and knew my life would change forever. It was beautiful; the wood, the strings, the curve of it, the promise of it all. I loved the thing itself and it's potential. I also loved the hard black case with it's furry blue lining, the music stand, the bow, the rosin. I rememeber laying it all out on my bedroom floor and feeling like I had all the tools for greatness. I'd rearrange them over and over on the carpet and look at myself in the mirror holding the violin up to my chin and already feel like I had accomplished something, just by association.

After we learned a couple plinks and plucks and how to hold it I felt pretty confidient I was a virtuoso in the making, then the music sheets came out. The music sheets. I remember so distinctly being in the linoleum music room and staring at Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or rather what said it was Twinkle Twinkle at the top of the page yet was just a series of blobs and sticks marked with swirly things. The instructor started talking us through the music and I remember thinking "Is she kidding?" I turned to another kid in class for solidarity, prolly about to say something like "What's with these dots, am I right?" but when I faced the other kids in class I realized I was the only one who didn't know what to do about these hyrogliphics mascerading as a song. Even at 8 I had a pretty horrible go at it with authority figures and teachers (I was already in my second school by this time, having transfered after an unreconsilable first grade experience and was down at the Principle's Office enough to be on a first name basis with everyone at my current school) so I opted to keep my mouth shut and pretend I knew what was going on. This pretending went deep. I mimed what I saw the other kids doing with their fingers and bows, but kept my bow a few centimeters above the strings as to not make any actual noise. I even pretended to mess up at points; squinting at the sheet music and jolting my arm in frustration, then shaking it off for the refrain of Mary Had a Little lamb. If there is a refrain. I don't know, I can't read music. I would also often volunteer to play solo in front of the class when the teacher would ask "Can anyone play the second bar for us?" - my arm would shoot up with a beliveable amount of confidience and if she actually called on me I would just say I had to go to the bathroom and excuse myself.

This went on and on and on until finally we had our concert. I was very nervous that someone in the audience would call me out as a fraud. I imagined an unknown adult standing mid song and pointing at me in slow motion "She is not really playing! The unusually tall kid doesn't have the bow on her strings!" and then my life would be over. Luckily, I made it through the concert without such incident and greeted my parents in the lobby for brownies just like everyone else. Suckers. When I saw my parents they said to me "You were great! We could hear you above everyone else! You were the best" they hugged and congratulated me, meanwhile I was more confused than ever. I thought about it all night "We could HEAR you above everyone else" I thought about those words over and over until I finally realized: parents lie. That, of course, opened a Pandora's Box that I wasn't ready for; if parents lie that means my macaroni portrait of George Washington might not have looked life-like, or that they don't enjoy the stuffed animal pageants I put on. What if Santa and the tooth fairy don't really exist, what if they DO have a favorite child and what if it's not me? My mind was basically imploding and it was too much for my single digit brain to handle. I didn't know how to go on, how would I ever glue another piece of macaroni art or make my parents watch me roller skate down the hallway ever again? Unable to face such anarchy I reasoned that they thought they heard me. They thought they heard me because I made them think they could. I had willed them to hear me with my amazing abilities as a pretender. I was too good. I was not meant to play violin, no. I was meant for the stage. I was clearly a born actor, I had, after all, convinced two perfectly sane adults with functioning ears that they heard me play an only slightly imperfect Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I promptly gave up violin and that same year auditioned for my first play; a community production of Godspell where I not only secretly lip synced all my lines in the chorus but also not so secretly mouthed all of Jesus' lines- a feat both of my parents assured me made the play much better. And I believed them. Happily.

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

A:  (Sigh) money. I just got back from London where I was working with the Old Vic/New Voices Exchange and meeting with some theaters over there. The amount of theater that happens there is incredible, theaters produce like 17 shows in a season sometimes more, so many of them new plays and most of those by new playwrights. Their theaters are funded by the government. A portion of the money that folks spend on lottery tickets goes into the theater. On top of that they do fundraising and have donors. Therefore they do not rely on ticket sales and so they can take more risks, make more new plays. The reading circuit/"development" almost doesn't exist over there, I heard many people say "The best way to serve a playwright and their play is to put their play on" and it's true. They can do that because theater (and art in general) is not just considered a vital part of their culture, it is funded as such. If we (New York/America/Etc) didn't have to pull our hair out over ticket sales and making budget cuts we could make more of what we are capable of, actually put up the plays we hear again and again around music stands with bottled waters. That's not to say they don't have their share of hiccups across the pond, I think if we could merge our two theater climates, we would have theater-utopia.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Theatrical heroes. Well, first and foremost Eric Bogosian. I played Sooze in subUrbia in my hometown circa 1998 and like most young or formerly young folks in the theater, that play changed my life. And then in 2003 or 04 I worked with Bogosian as an actor on two new plays of his and then he gave me a job as his assistant and I moved to New York (making him a personal hero as well). He writes what he wants to see. He writes for his friends, his community, himself; and that is why his work is so immensely watchable while still challenging it's audience. It's hard to trust yourself like that. It's hard not to change with whatever way the wind is blowing at that moment, the wind in this business can blow you right off the page but he has always made exactly what he wants to make.

Charles Busch is another. If you have not read his book Whores of Lost Atlantis, I highly recommend it. It is "fiction" but it's really not; it's really about him getting his play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom into it's off-Broadway run (a play that went on to be the longest running off-Broadway non-musical) he is another example of making the plays you want to see, making the theater for your friends and community and he did whatever it took to get them up, made costumes out of anything he could find and performed in crappy bars. He did it for nothing but the love AND his plays are hilarious. I preformed in Psycho Beach Party (directed by the aforementioned Moss) on and off for about a year and laughed at every rehearsal and every show felt like well, a party- for a year. It's not easy to make something so unabashedly fun. The word "fun" sounds like a small word but it's not. It's big. It's important.

There are a bunch of theatrical heroes out there. Josh Conkel who is a dear friend is also a theatrical hero of mine, he works harder than anyone I've ever met. He is always always working on something new and producing either a play of his own or a new play he really believes in and applying to everything and applying to everything again. And his work is amazing. If the world has any sense at all he will soon be celebrated everywhere.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I don't want to sound like the Easter Bunny but I am excited about theater that is made with love; of the craft, of the unknowable, of the everything. Even if what you're making is dark or difficult, if you lose that core you've lost your play. Or your comic. Or your multi-media art installation featuring live earthworms and 100 ipads, whatever it is you are making. I get excited about things that have that core, things that were made because the person making it wanted to see it, wanted to give it to their friends. I am excited by theater when I can feel people in it.

Theater that is especially exciting to me right now: Annie Baker's plays. Duh. They are like eating the best meal ever. The kind of food you can live off of. The Debate Society, I am new to knowing this company and I can't wait to know them all the more, I want them to always be making plays. LAByrinth's summer intensive is coming up and having been there twice I can't imagine another place on earth where that many plays (40 in 2 weeks, whaaaaaaat) are orbiting each other and bouncing around in such a supportive incubator. That's exciting. I'm excited for Orange Hat and Grace this fall at SoHo Rep (with the amazing Matt Maher, also of the Civilians divorce show).
And I am pretty hot on the theater that this generation is generating, proud and pumped to be of this age.

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

A:  Huh. Well, I am a playwright just starting out and I was once advised that one should be spending at least 20 percent of their waking time on their own work and that anything less would be a detriment. I took this advice and things changed. It was very good advice. Find a writing group, or start one. Or both. I think without a community you can become a kind of stray cat meowing at an abyss of doorsteps. Run in a pack. Also, have someone to look up to, it gives you somewhere to go. And of course see lots of things, not just plays. One of my most favorite "theater" experiences was the Tino Sehgal exhibit at the Guggenheim, so so so good. And write like it's your job, because until you do that, it never will be. I am still taking all of this advice, so let me know how it turns out if you get there first.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My divorce comics and The Civilians on WNYC Culture page: http://culture.wnyc.org/series/divorce/

There will also be an exciting event for this project on June 28th at WNYC's Green Space, keep your eyes peeled. I'll be there doing something amazingly audio-visual with my comics!

Also on Monday June 14th some incredible friends of mine are doing a benefit to raise money for my late-stage-neurological Lyme Disease treatment. My health insurance won't cover it, obviously and my brain doesn't know the difference. The show is at Dixon Place and features (the aforementioned) Eric Bogosian, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Blazz & the 88Sound (feat. FELA!’s Kevin Mambo) plus so many more wonderfully talented people that I am forever grateful are so generous. Tickets for Nikole’s Tick Parade are $35 and are available NOW EXCLUSIVELY at http://thetickparade.eventbrite.com/ and for more info you can visit the facebook event page

AND I perform every Saturday afternoon at the Drama Book shop with The Story Pirates, (stories written by kids performed by adults who wish they still were) It is certainly the most rewarding and hilarious thing I have ever been a part of, do check it out. Our next AfterDark show (with drinks and all people your own age in the audience) is at Galapagos on July 30th. Not to be missed.

I Interview Playwrights Part 190: Andrea Lepcio

 

Andrea Lepcio

Hometown: Boston,  Mass

Current Town : New York,  New York

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I work on multiple projects at once. That seems to work for me. Currently, I’m getting ready for a work in progress presentation of a new musical The Ballad of Rom and Julz at Bard Summerscape in the Spiegeltent this July. Cheryl Davis is the lyricist and Brooke Fox is the composer and I’m the bookwriter. This Spring, I workshopped Sad? Mad? Glad? Bad? at New Georges. I’ve been developing this play with director Melissa Maxwell and New Perspectives Theater. This re-write, I think I’m going to re-title the play Tunnel. Vision. Dinner at Home Between Deaths is my newest play. I’ve just finished the first draft of act one and have been bringing pages to read at Naked Angels Tuesdays at 9. There’s also another musical in the works with composer/lyricist Stephen Sislen.

Q:  Can you tell me about the profiles of female playwrights and how you got involved?

A:  There has been this push to increase awareness around the lack of parity for women theater artists over the past couple of years. Julia Jordan and Sarah Schulman called a meeting at New Dramatists a couple of Septembers ago and related activities have brewed since including a working group at Dramatist Guild, the formation of the 50/50 in 2020 group and the Lilly Awards. I’m a big believer that awareness leads to change and I think we are starting to see that in increased opportunities for women. At a November meeting of 50/50, Cindy Cooper suggested we needed a website to promote women’s work. I thought we could ask Martin Denton of New York Theatre Experience. He loved the idea and launched Plays by Women on www.nytheatre.com which lists all plays written or created by women playing in New York . He also committed to reviewing as many shows by women as by men in the coming year and selected 50/50 in 2020 as one of their People of the Year. As we planned and schemed, we came up with the idea of generating profiles of women playwrights to provide audiences, theaters, producers and other readers with a source of information on women they may not know or may have heard or but not seen or read and including those they may know well and want to read more about. I put the word out and was delighted by the response from different writers – playwrights, directors, actors, critics and others – who were inspired to write about a playwright they love. We launched with 19 profiles at the end of April and have many more in the works. We’re including everyone we can from the most emerging to the most established. We’d also like to expand to directors as well as to add profiles of theaters with a mission to produce women artists.

I just checked and you are not far from parity so far with your interviews. Dig that. And I want to add I love being included in something that is for all playwrights, like your interviews, just as I love being selected for a production or an award from among all playwrights, not just women. I’ve waited my whole life for my gender not to matter. Still waiting.

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 was 4 when my Mom started dating the nice older man across the court. They both had two daughters (he had full custody of his which was pretty unusual in the 60s.) And so we all went to the beach together and they went alone on enough dates together to decide to get married. I’d already seen a lot of let’s call it change in my first 4 years and was pretty determined to make this thing work. Plus, I liked my step-dad. And I was crazy about my oldest step-sister, Meryl. So one day, relatively soon after we’d moved into their place, Meryl and I decide to put on a show. We made up a story line, a sequence of three comic events. I don’t remember this first work in its entirety, but it involved me entering in some very big pants, encountering something that got me dirty (a common theme in my life at the time – mother hated dirt) and attempting to wash the pants. The piece climaxed with me retrieving my pants from behind the “washing machine” chair, but they were now doll’s size. The thing I remember the best was the laughter. My step-Dad howled. He practically fell off his chair. I felt like I was floating in the air on that laughter.

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

A:  Make the pie bigger. It’s too hard to make a living doing this thing we all love. So, I suppose, I would also have to make it smarter. I think there is actually a ton of money being spent making theater, but the distribution of that money is skewed away from the artists. I believe it is possible to find a smarter distribution of the resources at hand that could provide artists with living wages and result in the making of better theater.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Anyone who breaks the ice (as de Kooning said of Pollack.) I can’t remember exactly, but Arthur Miller said a similar thing about Tennessee Williams, that Tennessee had broken through the veil of realism to a deeper level of poetic expression, something like that. Anyone who breaks through to something that wasn’t there before, whatever that something is. So, Samuel Beckett, Suzi-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill. My heroes are also my teachers: Milan Stitt who taught me so many things and encouraged me to build and never lose my writer muscles. Tina Howe who taught me to write every day so that I could fail better as Beckett instructs. And my heroes are the ones who keep making new work for the theater for decades with need, desire, joy and gumption like Terrence McNally and Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and Edward Albee and Martha Graham and ….

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I dig intimacy over distance, depth over irony. I like big, challenging, messy, thought/heart-provoking work. I get excited by theater that is reflective of the world I live in meaning theater that includes lesbian, gay, trans characters who are real or unique or unexpected as opposed to stereotypical cardboard cut outs telling the same lame jokes or whiny about the same old thing. I am excited by theater that includes characters of all races and mixed races similarly real or unique and not stereotyped. I am excited by this inclusion whether in a naturalistic play on Broadway or avant garde downtown and get mad bored without it. Overall, I am excited by theater that is life changing. Every time I go to the theater, that’s what I am hoping for.

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

A:  Give yourself the time and the space to write and in that t/s write what you want to write. Figure out what you need and go for that, whatever and wherever that is. Make your own opportunities. Believe that the time is now and the world is yours.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Ballad of Rom and Julz at Bard Summerscape July 25

Looking for the Pony at Venus Theater, Maryland in October and Detroit Repertory Theatre in June 2011

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