I Interview Playwrights Part 250: Jordan Harrison

Jordan Harrison

Hometown: Bainbridge Island, WA

Current Town: Brooklyn

Q:  Tell me about Futura and your triple premiere.

A:  Futura is having a shared premiere this fall at Theatre @ Boston Court, Portland Center Stage, and National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) in New York. Three different directors, three different productions – it’s weird and wonderful, and I hope it doesn’t make me crazy. The play was having a hard time finding a home – there were a few heartbreaking close calls – and suddenly three theaters all came forward the same month. So it made sense to have this kind of loose partnership.

The play begins with a 35-minute lecture about typography – then it goes somewhere very different. I liked the idea of writing a sort of thriller about fonts. And there are some stylistic things in the play that I almost never try: long, extended scenes; lots of crackling backstory. When I started working on the play, I quickly learned that I couldn’t write about typography without also writing about the extinction of the printed word. Which is happening so quickly that it’s hard to write predictive fiction about it.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I’m workshopping a new play called Maple and Vine about a couple who move to a 1950s reenactionist society. A world where it’s always 1955, with all the gender and racial implications of that. It began as a project I was developing with Annie Kauffman for The Civilians, based on interviews with people who retreat from the modern world: the Amish, cloistered nuns, off-gridders, etc. And ultimately we decided to toss out the interviews – I wrote a whole new play fertilized by the ruins of the interview play. It was pretty scary to start over, but I was sort of relieved to discover that I’m better at making things up than editing. (I had always secretly wondered if I was better at editing, since I enjoy splicing things together a lot more than staring at a blank page.)

I also have a children’s musical called The Flea and the Professor at the Arden Theatre in Philly in the spring. I adapted it from Hans Christian Andersen’s final story with the composer Richard Gray. I don’t think I’ve ever had a better time writing something. There’s a giant magnifying glass and a cannibal princess and a big Carnival-type number in which the only lyric is the word “Gobble.” I’m also working on a grown-up musical called Suprema with the composer Daniel Zaitchik and the director Sam Gold. I kind of love musical theater. I was in denial for a while.

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

A:  Everyone would go to it.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  (in reverse chronological order of encountering them) Charles Ludlam, Stephen Sondheim, Janet Cardiff, Wedekind, Paula Vogel, David Greenspan, Pina Bausch, Caryl Churchill, Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, Puccini, Meredith Willson (for The Music Man), and the kid who played Riff in high school.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Big and generous and ambitious and unabashedly theatrical.

There are some wonderful writers and directors who get a lot of mileage out of understatement and dryness, but I confess that I’ll often walk out of a theater saying, “Couldn’t someone have killed someone? Or fallen in love? Or time traveled?” I like to be taken somewhere, even if there isn’t a plot per se. I like things that risk tipping into melodrama or poetry. I like a play or a performance to go a little off the rails, but to have a strong sense that the artists are taking me there on purpose.

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

A:  After I wrote my first play, someone said to me “You’ll write a great third play.” And of course that stung: “I have to write a whole second play just to get to the third one?” But my third play ended up being the play that started everything for me, and by then I was glad that the first two plays were shut away in a drawer somewhere, safe from scrutiny. So don’t get hung up on the fate of your first play, or your second play. Just write the next one. It may be a boon if it takes a little longer to be recognized.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Oh, gosh. I’m almost effortfully out of the loop. My friend Bash Doran has a beautiful play called Kin coming up at Playwrights Horizons. I haven’t read Greg Moss’s play coming to Soho Rep, but I always love his writing. Will Eno’s wonderful play Middletown is coming to the Vineyard soon. What else. The High Line. Freaks and Geeks on Youtube. Banh mì at Hanco’s. Any kind of greasy noodles from the Flushing mall.

I Interview Playwrights Part 249: Alexandra Collier

Alexandra Collier

Hometown: Melbourne, Australia

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Too many things at once, including writing a TV series with my friend Georgia Clark called On This Side (a drama set in Brooklyn about a group of late 20/early 30-somethings trying to be adults), also writing an eternal screenplay and a play that I just started working on at the Erik Ehn silent retreat that’s set in a small dusty Australian town populated by - yes, I am going to say this and destroy my attempt to rid American’s minds of an Aussie cliché - crocodiles.

Q:  Tell me about the Women's Project Playwrights Lab.

A:  It’s a 2 year lab to support playwrights. I haven’t started the lab yet but it seems like a totally kick arse, invaluable resource for female playwrights. We also get to connect with female producers and directors through those labs that run simultaneously.

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 think writing stuff down is a kind of compulsion that starts pretty early on in life. As a kid, I often used to stay at my grandparents house on the weekends – and I’d spend the whole time in the backyard reading or writing and drawing in a big scrapbook, it was really my favourite thing to do. I composed some genius poetry, which I discovered recently and read to my Mum. For some reason she was laughing a lot. My grandparents bookshelves were stocked with all my Mum’s old English girls' boarding school books about playing lacrosse and having midnight feasts. Totally outdated and completely irrelevant to my life but for some reason, I devoured them. So I think writing and reading was and always will be a complete escape from reality – a daydream of being somewhere/someone else. Writers are just kids who get to keep playing out these fantasy games in their head and putting them down on paper, all the while pretending to the world that we’re adults and passing it off as a profession.

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

A:  That it’s more rigorous and more spectacular – in the same breath, so they’re one thing really.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Harold Pinter (I’m sad I never got to meet him), Caryll Churchill, Tennessee Williams, Wallace Shawn, Anne Bogart, Sam Shephard, Sarah Ruhl, Margaret Cameron (Aussie writer/director/performer) and too many others to name…

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that takes stamina. Theatre that is visually stunning. Theatre that uses words economically but poetically. I remember seeing Chuck Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0 at Signature Theater a few years back and the actors were literally running up the walls and breathing in sync. At the end of the show people were standing up out of their chairs and weeping (OK, maybe that was just me). But I think that is what theatre should be – enough of all this sedentary sitting around in the living room talking. Actors should kick arse – they should be gods. And writers (myself included) and directors should work to eliminate mediocrity in our work.

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

A:  Read a lot. Write a lot. Write a lot of terrible, terrible plays. I keep re-reading these Tennessee Williams essays – and this was a guy who had great success and great failure all in one lifetime - and the fact is, he just didn’t stop writing for his whole life. Even when he was accused of being what he called “a ghost of a playwright.” He wrote and wrote and wrote – some of it was embarrassingly bad. The more you write, the better you’ll get and maybe the closer you’ll get to saying what you want to say. I need to take my own advice and go write now.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  May Adrales and I have been working on a play I wrote called Deathless – about living forever in a world that’s falling apart – that we plan to have a workshop of in the coming months at IRT (stay tuned).


www.alexandracollier.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 248: Jessica Goldberg

Jessica Goldberg

Hometown: Woodstock, NY.

Current Town: LA.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a new play with Darrell Griffin Sr. who lost his son in Iraq. Darrell, a CPA from Van Nuys, became obsessed with what happened to his son there, and decided he needed to go to Iraq to find out--together we've turned his extraordinary story into a piece of theater. I'm writing an adaptation of the book PASSING STRANGE by Martha Sandweiss for HBO, a pilot for ABC, and rewriting the film Heart of a Soldier for Universal.

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 parents used to pile the three of us kids into their beat up yellow station wagon to visit the grandparents in Connecticut. Ten minutes into the drive, we'd be beating the shit out of each other. The only way our parents could get us to calm down was to put a Leonard Cohen in the tape deck, soon we'd be singing along.

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

A:  Support, support, support.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Chekhov, Fornes, Churchill, Shepard... those are the first to jump into my head.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Character, story, language, imagination...

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

A:  Build community. If you cant get your work up, put it up yourself. And, most importantly, always be writing.

I Interview Playwrights Part 247: Nick Starr

Nick Starr

Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Current Town: Brooklyn, New York

Q: Tell me about The Awesome Dance

A:  It follows for souls through four lifetimes as they try to work out mutually inflicted traumas and find harmony. I guess what I was hoping to do with this play was examine the idea of good guys and bad guys and try to turn the whole notion of victimhood on its ear. David Mamet says that we watch television in order to see good people do bad things and bad people do good things. I think this is a very intriguing claim: that in some way we have a deep desire to see the good and the bad transposed. I believe this desire - perversity? - is driven by a deep and maybe unresolvable understanding that good and bad (people, actions, ideas) are nearly impossible to distinguish from one another, at least in real time.

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

A:  I have this idea for a season of theater, the working title of which is "Off Off is On" where the best Off Off Broadway productions are staged in the biggest Broadway houses and the big Broadway musicals are crammed into tiny grungy fourth floor walk up black box theaters. What appeals to me about this idea is...well it's kind of perverse. But also, I think we're hiding a lot of the best things that happen in this city in very small, hard to find places as if we're ashamed of them. So, the world of theater is like the world of everything else: upside down. I would like to change that.

Q:  What else are you up to?

A:  I was just hired to write and perform a rap song for a viral video promoting a new e-reader. I'm also working on a movie about body switching and a play about cults.

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’m standing in the backyard with my little brother Jim. I’m seven, he’s five. And I have decided to invent my own martial art. So, I ask my brother to kick me. The plan is, he will try to kick me, but I will block the kick. Then I will respond with an inspired combination of punches, kicks and eventual chokeholds that will comprise the basis for a New Era in the world of self-defense.

So, I’m in the process of asking Jim to kick me when I’m interrupted by this strange ringing, noise. I cannot figure out where this noise coming from, but it’s very loud and very high pitched. And what I realize, after a moment, is that the ringing is actually coming from within my own head.

When I asked my brother to kick me, he responded with a lightning fast exquisite roundhouse to the left side of my jaw. At the same time I experience all this, I watch it all unfold from above. It’s a classic slapstick: the bully suddenly in the shoes of his intended victim.

It’s a transcendent moment and my first moment of theatre. Not only am I the older brother, I’m the younger brother, too. More strangely, I’m the backyard and the roundhouse kick. I relive this experience every time I work on a new play. I watch the characters, and I am the characters. I think that day in the backyard truly injured my brain.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like plays written by Checkov, Caryl Churchill, Annie Baker, Conor McPherson; directed by Les Waters, Sam Gold; staged in gyms or churches or converted gyms. I prefer humor so dry it could burst into flame at any moment; drama that makes you laugh and you don't know if you should be laughing; plays like The Weir that are so much scarier than horror movies.

I Interview Playwrights Part 246: Young Jean Lee

Young Jean Lee

Hometown: Pullman, WA

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I have a 13P show coming up in the spring, which is called ONE-WOMAN SHOW and which will be performed by me. Singing and dancing will probably be involved. I can't act and hate performing, so it should be interesting to see what happens. The YJLTC show I'm working on is called UNTITLED FEMINIST MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY SHOW, which is basically what it sounds like, and which we'll be workshopping at the New Museum in December. I'm also writing a horror movie set at an artist colony for Plan B and Paramount. I'm preparing for YJLTC's fall tours of THE SHIPMENT, and I'll also be directing a production of PULLMAN, WA in London with an all-British cast in the fall.

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 first memory of writing for an audience was in math class. I was sitting at a table with a bunch of other girls, and I had written really disgusting erotica involving each of them and whatever boy in school they happened to find the most unappealing. I remember reading the stories out loud and watching each featured girl writhe around in grossed-out agony while the other girls laughed hysterically. It never would have occurred to me at the time that I would someday make a living doing something very similar.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Shakespeare, Beckett, Ionesco, John Ashbery (he's written some amazing plays), Richard Foreman, Elizabeth LeCompte, Richard Maxwell, Mac Wellman, John Jesurun. There are a lot of other theater artists who inspire me, but those are the ones who made me want to make theater in the first place.

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

A:  If you want a playwriting "career", then you have to think of it as a business. Get to know your market. Think from the perspective of the producers and presenters. What do they need to do in order to keep their jobs? What has succeeded and failed for them in the past? How do you fit into that equation? Find people for whom you'd be the perfect fit and convince them of this. Don't ever think of yourself as a supplicant, hoping you're what they're looking for. Figure out what they're looking for, and if you're not it, then either become that thing (if that's what you want to become) or don't waste your time on them. Someday they may change their minds and come to you. If someone they respect likes your work, then tell them so (instant door-opener). Apply for things--even if you don't get them, important people will see your work. If you end up working for someone who could help your career, WORK YOUR ASS OFF FOR THEM (unless they are ungrateful pricks, in which case quit immediately). Don't fall into the trap of feeling entitled to career success solely on account of your talent. There's a huge market for mediocre art, and the less-talented wipe the floor with the more-talented every day.

I Interview Playwrights Part 245: Christina Gorman

Christina Gorman

Hometown: Colts Neck, NJ

Current town: Westchester, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  The play is titled Orion Rising. It’s about a woman who becomes obsessed with a dilapidated store window display, convinced it depicts her recent near-drowning in the sea. All kinds of strange events start happening inside and outside the window display, causing the woman to start questioning what’s reality and what may be her insanity.

In its first draft, Orion Rising was this quasi-fairy tale of a play. Then my father died, and now the play has taken, perhaps not surprisingly, somewhat of a dark turn. It’s become very, well, personal—more personal than any other work of mine. But I have this quote from Craig Wright that I read everyday about writing to save your own life, about sharing your dreams, fears and obsessions. So, yeah, I’m going with it and we’ll see where it takes me.

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 raised in central New Jersey, and every year for my birthday, my parents would bring me to see a Broadway show. (I saw The Tap Dance Kid. Oh yes I did.) This once-a-year business wasn’t near enough to satisfy me, but my mother would have none of it. As far as she was concerned, “the city” was this nearby yet faraway place where no decent parent allowed their innocent children venture alone. So I did what any self-respecting teen would do: I lied. I’d tell my mother I was going to a friend’s house for the day. Then I’d take the train into Penn Station, snag a ticket at the TKTS booth, see a matinee, and take the train back home.

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

A:  Paychecks, as in, will and/or wish them into existence.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes.

A:  Stoppard, Kushner, and Vogel, for starters.

Q:  What kind of theatre excites you?

A:  I love the kind of theatre that hits me in both the heart and the head. If I walk out of the theatre having been intellectually challenged and at the same time having been incredibly moved, I’m so wound up I don’t sleep the whole night. It’s the best kind of exhaustion there is.

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

A:  Unless you’re incredibly lucky or immensely talented (and often even if you’re immensely talented), this profession is a war of attrition. Be patient. Very very patient. Keep at it. Try to enjoy the small successes along the way. And for God’s sake, get out there and meet people. So much of this business is about relationships, and next to no one produces a play by a playwright they’ve never heard of or met.