I Interview Playwrights Part 262: Brian Polak

Brian Polak

Hometown: Keene, NH

Current Town: Pasadena, CA

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  This spring I finished a play titled “Underground” about a subway busker with an infatuation for the Unabomber. This play started off as an hour-long monologue almost five years ago. It has evolved into something decidedly not a monologue.

My wife, Jami Brandli (who is also a playwright), and I participated in challenge with each other during the month of August. We decided to use Facebook as a motivational tool rather than a constant distraction. We would work on a new play each day and update our status with our progress. The idea was to keep us focused on our work by proclaiming it publicly to hundreds of people. I finished a first draft of a play titled “moments before medicine” during the challenge. I’m really excited about it. It’s a two-hander about manipulation, drug addiction and abortion. Not really, but sort of.

Next up is a play about animal cruelty involving a matador who quits in the middle of a bullfight. After that is a play about the death penalty involving a prisoner who can’t be put to death by lethal injection because his veins are too small.

Jami and I are also finishing a TV pilot and a couple screenplays that we’re writing together.

Q:  Tell me about Boston Court.

A:  (I think most people in the LA theatre community see me as a marketing person at Boston Court and not a playwright. I get “Oh, you’re a playwright?” a lot when it comes up.)

I feel very fortunate to be employed full time not only in a theatre, but a theatre I would pay money to visit. Boston Court focuses on new works, although not exclusively. In 2009 we did two world premieres. This year we are doing four. The plays we do are all inherently theatrical, which is something I appreciate. The theater space itself is a perfect canvas for actors, directors, designers and playwrights. I know I work here and am supposed to say this, but if you live in the LA area and DON’T come to see the plays produced here you are really missing something special.

One of the greatest benefits of working here, other than the snacks in the greenroom, is the exposure I have to so many ridiculously talented theatre people. I bend the ears of our artistic directors, directors, playwrights, actors, designers, production manager and technical director as much as I can. I squeeze as much knowledge out of them as I can. And, fortunately for me, we hire talented AND generous people who are willing to talk to me. Sometimes I pretend I’m talking to them for “marketing purposes.” Usually it’s because I’m curious.

Whether you are in the area or not, follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook and you’ll have the pleasure of reading about some of my interesting and inane shenanigans at Boston Court. I’m lucky that part of my job is to be in Facebook and Twitter all the time.

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 the following took place I wasn’t a child as far as age is concerned, but as you’ll see I was still a child mentally. This is a story I have told many times over the years. I feel the need to repeatedly confess…

I was in New York for work many years ago. I had just been dumped. It was snowing. I was depressed, angry and short-tempered. I remember the day like it was yesterday and not almost nine years ago. It was a Friday. There was a blizzard. After work I had to get across town for something inconsequential. The office I was working out of was located on 8th Ave and 15th. The snow was coming down heavily and I was certain it would be difficult to hail a cab. As soon as I stepped out of the door onto the street an available cab approached. I thought I was lucky; my miserable, pathetic life was finally turning around. He pulled over and I stepped in "1st Ave and 1st Street," I told him. The nexus of the universe.

After telling the driver where I needed to go I sat back and sulked like a baby "my life sucks," I remember saying to myself. The cab driver was jabbering about something, but I wasn't paying attention. I figured he was on his cell phone or singing along to a song in a language I didn't understand. After a couple of moments I happen to lock eyes with him through the rear view mirror. He wasn't jabbering or singing. He was talking to me. I leaned in towards the opening in the plexiglass separating us "Excuse me?" I asked. "You shoulda caught a cab on the other side of the street," he barked. Was he serious? He couldn't have been serious. "Are you serious?" I asked. "If you know you have to go that way, that is where you catch the cab." I was dumbfounded. Or flabbergasted. Or flabberfounded. It took me about 2 seconds to lose my shit. "Just drive me where I tell you to drive me," I screamed. He screamed back. I wasn't hearing his words. All I knew was that he was yelling and I was pissed. "Just drive, you asshole." I heard him say something to the effect of "I'll drive you to Harlem and leave you there." I rattled of a series of "Fuck you's" for about 20 seconds straight. What he said in response was beyond my comprehension.

Why was I having this argument? I didn't really understand. I started to realize there was a chance I could end up in Harlem, about a bazillion blocks from where I needed to be, so I screamed "Pull over. Pull the fuck over NOW!" He kept screaming back at me, but he obliged at the next corner. I was out-of-my-mind at this point. As soon as the cab came to a stop I threw the door open and put one foot into the wintery-New-York-street-slush-muck. I looked back at the driver who was still screaming at me, his face perfectly framed by the rectangular opening in the plexiglass separation. I then reached down and grabbed a handful of icey-slushy-muck and threw it directly in his face, punctuated with a "FUCK YOU!" I slammed the door and walked off. Fifteen or twenty steps later I realized what I had done. There was something wrong with me and changes needed to be made or else I could end up in a gutter in with my face kicked in someday. I started to change that day. Today, nearly nine years later, I write about that guy a lot.

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

A:  It is logistically impossible for theaters to have an open submission policy. There are too many plays and not enough time to read and consider them all. I would like to change that.

On the other side of the coin, I’d like playwrights to really figure out if a theater is a good match for their work before sending it out. We are the ones who are creating the stacks of plays that nobody can get through because we’re sending our kitchen sink dramas to theaters looking for musicals.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My wife is my theatrical hero. Before I met her I was simply dipping my toe in writing while my primary creative impulse was acting. She got me to dive in completely and showed me how to be dedicated to the craft. I may not have ever considered myself a writer if not for her. She is also the first and primary reader of all my work. I trust her opinion more than anybody else. I’d be screwed without her.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Going to theatre is like playing “Duck, Duck, Goose” when you REALLY want the goose, but you just keeping getting the duck. It’s really thrilling when you finally get a goose. I guess what I’m saying is I really like geese.

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

A:  Listen to your work. It will tell you exactly what you need to do next. Don’t be afraid to follow it. It doesn’t matter what you initially set out to write, once you start, the play is in charge. Do what it says.

Live a life. Have fun. Leave the computer at home sometimes. You’re still a writer even if you aren’t writing 24/7.

Read what every playwright said in this space before me. I have learned so much from reading these interviews. I’m sure everybody who follows me will also have fantastic advice. Bookmark this blog.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I have a short story coming out in the anthology “The Commonplace Book of the Weird.” Check it out. Its chock full of HP Lovecraft goodness. The book launch is October 18 at Bar 82 in NYC. More info here: http://www.facebook.com/l/e3a9aMSTB6i2qppTDzjlxmyI2EA;www.commonplacebooks.com/

Boston Court is presenting the world premiere of Jordan Harrison’s “Futura” beginning October 9th. See this play if you are in the LA area: http://www.facebook.com/l/e3a9amjbcG6lezbQo3VGFN3qXag;www.bostoncourt.com/events/62/futura

My wife has a play, “Technicolor Life” being presented at the Ashland New Play Festival October 21 and 22. http://www.facebook.com/l/e3a9ao6gAhFPbapxmqDclMY6QZw;www.ashlandnewplays.org/

I’m on the Board of Directors for needtheater in Los Angeles. They just opened the world premiere of Michael John Garces’ “The Web.” It runs through October 17 at ArtWorks in Hollywood. http://www.facebook.com/l/e3a9aybF_HrJyph-AVCsoJIcK3w;www.needtheater.org/home.html

I Interview Playwrights Part 261: Kate Fodor

Kate Fodor

Hometown: I spent the first half of my childhood in Connecticut and the second in New York City.

Current Town: Doylestown, Pennsylvania. (It’s a long story. A beautiful place and a long story.)

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m putting the finishing touches on a play called Rx, which is a romantic comedy (of a sort) set in the pharmaceutical industry. Or maybe it’s already done and I’ll leave it alone! It’s always so hard to tell. Also, I’m on what might be the last draft of a film adaptation of Elissa Wall’s memoir Stolen Innocence; I’m reading everything I can about the history of the birth-control pill for a play I’ve just started that’s (maybe) called Bedfellows; and I’m thinking in the shower about a musical for young people. I’m also about to take my first-ever playwriting class: Jeffrey Hatcher’s Art of Adaptation workshop in Philadelphia. I’m nervous.

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 narrated everything I did -- in my head and sometimes even aloud. It was third-person, past-tense and pretty much constant. If I was trotting up some steps, I’d think (or say) to myself, “She trotted up the steps.” If I was drifting off to sleep, I’d think, “She drifted off to sleep.” I thought about everything in terms of how it could be told as a story, and pretty much still do.

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

A:  Oh, you know, I guess I’d make it a little less fucking heartbreaking for people. Especially actors.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Margaret Edson is one, because she came in, wrote a gorgeous, heart-stopping, fiercely funny, unbearably tragic play, and then went back to teaching kindergarten, because that’s important, too.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Anything that deeply excited the people who made it. I don’t like slick, I don’t like flippant, I don’t like wise-ass. I’m a post-ironic kind of girl. I want catharsis. I want to believe.

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

A:  This is, oddly, from Cary Tennis, Salon.com’s advice columnist. I stumbled across it when I was procrastinating by looking for a juicy story about someone’s lurid, kinky problems. Instead, there was a letter from a novelist who was thinking about giving up writing, and a beautiful, brilliant response that read (in part):

“Remember that as a writer you must find your motivation internally, not in external rewards, and you work in opposition to the system, not as a supplicant to the system. Whatever contingent truces you have maintained with the system in order to participate in its orderly orgies of consumption and distribution, good for you. But you are not a part of the system. You are a free creative worker. You do not need the system to do your creating. You only need it as a utility to reach your audience, and increasingly not even for that. On the other hand, the system cannot create anything on its own. It can only manage and distribute. So it needs you. It needs you but it is not on your side. Remember that.”

I Interview Playwrights Part 260: Sibyl Kempson

Sibyl Kempson

Hometown: Stockholm. NJ

Current Town: NYC and Tannersville, PA

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Grant applications

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 heard something in my dad's basement one night. It kept me up all night. I was a little kid. It was a like banging, which happened at intervals and culminated in a terrible grinding sound. It scared the living shit out of me. I never found out what it was. I am certain it was diabolical in nature.

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

A:  The idea of what theater is.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Mac Wellman.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that doesn't look like theater and feels like religious ritual.

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

A:  Use your right brain, not your left brain.

I Interview Playwrights Part 259: Gary Garrison

Gary Garrison

Hometown: Orange, Texas

Current Town: Westport, Connecticut

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  For work (at the Dramatists Guild), the first national conference for playwrights scheduled for next June in Fairfax, Virginia. Can’t wait. How cool will that be? Hundreds of playwrights in the same space talking about their art. For my work at NYU, we’re just starting the new semester and I have twenty-four graduate students that I have to pull, kicking and screaming, towards dramatic structure. (Everyone hates dramatic structure. Why? I have a theory . . .)

In my creative writer-life, I’m collaborating on a play with my good friend, Roland Tec, for this really unusual theatre event called Splash. Here's how it works: a play is written in which all characters in the story are meeting each other for the first time. If there are five characters in the play, five different theatre companies with unique casts and directors put the play into rehearsal. A design team designs the production and shares that work with all five theatre companies.

On each day of a public performance, the Production Stage Manager calls one character from each theatre company for the show that night. Actors are kept isolated from each other and meet one another -- like in the play -- for the first time on stage. It's balls-to-the-wall theatre, baby -- not unlike being thrown head-first into the swimming pool (hence, the name, “Splash.”) Everyone involved has to be fearless; I mean, you really have to have actors willing to take a risk few have ever taken. For the audience, it’s a total roller coaster ride; they get to share the excitement, tension and unpredictability of what happens on stage when strangers meet strangers.

The story we’re writing for the event is about the Rubber Rooms in New York City – those ridiculous holding tanks for middle to high school academics who’ve been brought up on disciplinary charges and are waiting trial. I don’t know how much you know about the Rubber Rooms, but they’re rooms spread across the five boroughs that hold hundreds of teachers on full-salary day in and day out. It’s insane! The city’s practically bankrupt, and yet we’re paying for teachers to sit on their asses all day long while the school board is waiting to decide if saying “shit” in class is an educational offense. WHAT? Of course, that’s simplifying it a bit, but not by much.

Q:  You are the Executive Director of Creative Affairs of the Dramatists Guild. Why should every playwright join the Guild?

A:  If nothing else, for the sense of community – to not feel so isolated as writer, no matter where you live. As I travel out and about meeting playwrights, listening to their concerns, talking to them about issues that effect their day to day writing lives, most everyone shares a common thread: that feeling of stark isolation. I mean, writing is a solo sport anyway. But once you’re written, you need to connect to your people, your tribe, if not for professional reasons, for reasons of the heart and soul. So one thing we do well at the Guild is build and foster community.

Probably most importantly, we protect the authorial rights of writers through contract advice and advocacy. What do you do when a director says to you, “I’ll direct your play, but in exchange for the value I bring to the experience, I’d like you to give me 5% of all future profits of your play”? And it doesn’t stop with 5%, believe me: 15%, 20% 30% and on and on. Well, if the director wants a chunk, and the producer wants a chunk, and the producing theatre wants a chunk, if you’re not careful, you’ll have nothing left over (you’d be surprised how often this happens). If you’re a member of the Guild, you just pick up the phone and call the Business Affairs office. We have a – errr – solid response for anyone asking you for money when you make so little money to begin with.

We also have a great magazine; really interesting with articles about the life of a writer, craft, career, trends, etc. And our website (under construction right now) will host member profiles and the ability to upload/download scripts, resume, etc., message boards (looking for a collaborator anyone?), searchable data base of members, reports from different regions of the country – stuff like that. Really helpful stuff for writers in all stages of their careers.

Q:  You are a tireless advocate for and teacher of playwrights. How do you find the energy?

A:  That’s an easy question: I like what I do. When you like what you do, it’s not really work. Yeah, sometimes I get a little crazy (particularly when I neglect my own work, and I often do), but I never feel like I should not be doing this. I love all three equally well: artist, educator, administrator. Yeah, seems to fit my heart and soul, and seems to fit my manic personality.

Q:  What are playwrights doing right?

A:  Writing the stories they want to tell. I know that may sound simple minded, but it’s too easy to be swayed by trends, or a producer’s heavy hand, or a director’s off-handed comment about Act One; it’s too easy to write a play by committee. Writers seem to be driven to tell their own unique stories in the their own unique styles and to allow that work to find the home it needs to live in. Look, a true writer, a real writer just wants to tell his/her stories to an appreciative audience. Who said that had to be Broadway? Or Off-Broadway? Theatre can be made anywhere, and playwrights are finally understanding that plays are only literature until they’re realize by way of some sort of public storytelling. And if that happens to be in a bowling alley, well, so be it.

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 in a play, Miss Hepplewhite Takes Over, in junior high school. I don’t remember shit about the play, but I do remember that at one point, I had to sneeze into a bowl of cake batter and ruin the proverbial cake. Well, that point came during the performance, and I sneezed a sneeze like no other. Unfortunately, the force of the sneeze was so big that I blew batter up my nose and in my throat, choked and passed out on stage – but not before I heard the audience roaring with laughter. They had to bring the curtain down and call an ambulance. But people talked about me for weeks! That’s all I needed. That’s how I knew I belonged in the theatre.

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

A:  Health care. I know, I know. But I can dream, can’t I? If not health care, at least government support for artists. We could learn a lot from our friends across the pond. Seriously, we have to find a way to take care of our own.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Really? Oh, God. So many. For inspiration: Ibsen and Williams. For wit and comic artistry: Wilde, Moliere, Faydeau, Durang, Simon. For character: Lillian Hellman, Lanford Wilson, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Peter Shaffer. For balls: Caryl Churchill. For scope: Tony Kushner. If I were going to the theatre tonight, I’d like to see a new play by Doug Wright, Lynn Nottage, Martin McDonaugh, John Logan, Carlos Murillo, Lucy Thurber, Anne Washburn or Gary Sunshine. If I could be anybody, or have their career: Theresa Rebeck. She’s a rock star.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Plays that can only really live in the theatre; plays that demonstrate why theatre is theatre – like Coram Boy, Angels in America, Red or The Pillowman.

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

A:  Don’t write “what you know.” Write what you don’t know. You’ll be forced to think harder, deeper, be more honest, research, think, think, think . . . And remember, structure is as much for you as it is for the audience. Nobody would strike out to drive to Hallifax, Nova Scotia without a map or some road signs or something that said, “this is the way, and you’re making progress.”

I Interview Playwrights Part 258: Saviana Stanescu

Saviana Stanescu

Hometown: Bucharest, Romania?

Hmm, Bucharest is actually my birth-town, I kinda hesitate to still consider it my hometown after almost 10 years of living in NYC… a hometown should be a town/city where you feel at home, where you pay rent to have a home :), where you struggle to pay that rent, and that’s New York for me now…

Plus, over there in Romania I spent my childhood raised by my grandparents in Curtea-de-Arges (Arges-Court, the first capital of Walachia), then my parents took me to Pitesti, a sort of Detroit of Romania known for the car industry, although they were making only one sort of cars with an ancient name: Dacia. I went to high-school there. During Ceausescu’s dictatorship of course. Then back to Bucharest for college, revolution, freedom, work, love, writing, fame :)

So I’m not sure which one is my hometown. I guess all of them. I’m a giant snail with her home on her back.

Current Town:

This one is clearer: New York, USA

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I am working on multiple “fronts” as always:

We are in final rehearsals with “Polanski Polanski” (performed by Grant Neale, directed by Tamilla Woodard) for a short run at HERE Arts Center, Sept 22-25.

I am doing some rewrites on ANTS, a new play that I developed at NYTW and will have a staged reading at EST, directed by Daniella Topol, as part of their Octoberfest, on Oct 9 at 7 pm and Oct 10 at 8.30 pm.

I am also re-looking at my plays “For a Barbarian Woman” and “Bechnya” as two directors expressed interest in them. They had developmental readings (Long Wharf Theatre, Lark, Women’s Project) but haven’t been produced yet.

And on top of everything, I am starting a new play at the Lark: “The Rehabilitation of Dracula” (working title) in which a character is challenging the well-spread iconic image of Dracula created by Bram Stoker with some “real” facts about the historical figure Vlad Tepes aka Vlad-the-Impaler, king of Walachia (he wasn’t even the king of Transylvania!), where I am actually from – see answer nr 1.

I kinda want to reclaim this character, Dracula, he has been over-exploited and over-commercialized, I feel the need to add my own fictionalization spiced up with the historical “truth”. Vlad-the-Impaler is still seen as a hero in present day Romania, most of the people are still proud of the way he led the country, with stamina and strength, fighting against the Ottomans and other super-powers, so it’s interesting for me to juxtapose a “patriotic” local image to the one created by the Western world. In a world full of constructed images, is there such thing as the “truth” about Dracula?

Q:  Tell me about your playwriting workshops.

A:  I’ve been teaching a lot lately. First of all, I’ve been teaching at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, in the Drama Department, as an adjunct instructor, for the last 7 years and I love it. I studied at NYU myself (MA in Performance Studies – Fulbright fellow, MFA in Dramatic Writing) and I enjoy the creative energy over there, at Tisch. That’s been my home here in the USA, I came to NYC in 2001, with a Fulbright grant, just a few weeks before 9/11. That traumatic moment made me a part of the NYC wounded fabric, I feel like we’ve been interconnected forever, like two old friends that shared difficult times.

Back in Romania, I was a respected journalist, published poet, award-winning playwright, y’know, sorta established, a big fish in a small vibrant pond. I had to start from the scratch over here, to prove myself again and again, and to do it with an accent… Dramatic living and dramatic writing. Good material for a playwright and a teacher :)

So in the last decade I’ve been teaching a bunch of playwriting workshops/courses here in the USA, but also in Mexico City, Stockholm/Sweden and Eastern Europe. This fall I am teaching at ESPA – Primary Stages and I am really excited to engage that wonderful community of artists.

Now a little self-praise paragraph: I’m a damn good teacher, I care about my students, I care about them learning something, being truthful to their voice, completing a draft of a play, having a product they’re proud of. I always try to organize a presentation of their work at the end of the course, it’s important for playwrights to see their texts presented with professional actors, in front of an audience. That’s the difference between literature and theatre, we as playwrights are part of a team that puts together a theatre show, a play can’t exist only in its literary form, without the actors, the director, the designers, the stage. Well, of course it can, but what’s the point? A play needs an audience, a playwright needs a team that showcases her/his 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:  Hmmm… my father, a former Balkan champion in high-jump, wanted me to be an athlete too, a champion, so I spent lots of years training in athletics, although my heart was in the arts. However, sports taught me something: to go on when you lose, to go on when you win, to engage in a fair competition, to rely on your team, basically to be a good… sport.

My values in theatre and life are similar. Paraphrasing one of my favorite playwrights, Samuel Beckett: I can’t go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that’s… theatrical.

I like bold, provocative, political, visceral, thought-provoking, risk-taking theatre that’s still dramatic and touching. I don’t care about post-dramatic theatre too much. Or any other post- post- post-… form of anything, I’d rather have AVANT(guarde:) )

On the other end of the spectrum:

I get bored by plays that are just TV dramas or sitcoms put on stage. Too conventional, too talk-talk-talk about relationships, too kitchen&sink… I am much more interested in vibrant theatrical plays about something bigger than the ordinary human commerce of emotions, plays that make larger/bolder comments on socio-political issues, existential turmoil, the irony of history, the global world and its flaws.

Yes, big words that might sound bombastic. But if theatre doesn’t fill them with meaning and depth, politics will never fail to fill them with rhetoric and demagogy…

Oh, and I didn’t mention that I like humor in a play. Dark humor generally. Humor makes bitter pills easier to be swallowed.

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

A:  Well, Lillian Hellman said: “If I had to give young writers advice, I'd say don't listen to writers talk about writing.”

But the author of “Little Foxes” (I just saw it at NYTW, beautiful production, that’s why Lillian came to my mind) also said: “I am a moral writer, often too moral a writer, and I cannot avoid, it seems, the summing-up. I think that is only a mistake when it fails to achieve its purpose, and I would rather make the attempt and fail, than fail to make the attempt.”

I actually really like this piece of advice: make the attempt and fail, rather than fail to make the attempt.

To put it in a less wise “quote-able” form: write if you feel like writing, don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you shouldn’t. That you’ll make more money as a banker, lawyer, doctor, athlete or IT guy. Although… that’s true. You might not make any money, you might end up old, lonely, poor and bitter, crying at the “grave” of your creativity and “wasted” life. But, you know what, whatever the “results”, at least you tried. You created something. You added a little something to the virtual archive of this theatrical universe. And you were true to yourself. That’s the most important thing.

OMG, I sound so wise and boring. Delete the last paragraph. Wait! Don’t.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come to see “Polanski Polanski” at HERE, Sept 22-25! It’s wild and dark and intriguing and provocative. Well, it’s Polanski!

(more info on my website www.saviana.com in the COMING UP section)

The staged reading of ANTS at EST, Oct 9 and 10 ! Directed by Daniella Topol. Featuring: Polly Lee, Alexis McGuinness, Robert Montano.

Oh, and I have a little one-min play "Boy meets Girl. Or not.", directed by Scott Ebersold, in the New York One-Minute Play Festival in Astoria - a cool festival, curated by Dominic D'Andrea, involving lots of playwrights friends. Sept 25-26.

I Interview Playwrights Part 257: Brian Bauman

Brian Bauman

Hometown:
I was born in a naval hospital in Groton, Connecticut. My family relocated often in my early childhood. My father was a supply officer on a nuclear submarine and the family would trail him as he moved from port to port.. I spent the longest part of my childhood in Burnt Hills, New York.

Current Town:
New York City

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I am writing a new play called A CRUCIBLE which is a riff on Arthur Miller's THE CRUCIBLE. The play's structure is a 9-month school year and is focused on a catholic school's drama club staging the original text. The questions I'm asking in the play are: how does playing a "witch" shape one's adolescent identity and how does it effect a budding sexual self? How and why are young people drawn to theater? How does teen pregnancy relate to quashed sex education programs? How do limited resources create a paranoid artistic society? Who/what is "in charge" of the literary canon, and why?

I recently collaborated with a Los Angeles-based choreographer named Alexandra Yalj for a piece going up at Highways Performance Space on September 12th called Dismantling Self. We re-appropriated text from the infamous spiritual leader OSHO's book Intuition, and combined it with writing I created about stripping & sex work, and the piece moved organically on from there into its present state, incorporating Lexie's personal love letters and more. I'm based in NY, so unfortunately I couldn't be in the studio with the group to watch it grow. I am very sorry to miss it.

I am looking for a place to remount a piece I created with Christo Allegra at the Broad Art Center in Los Angeles in May called ATTA BOY. The play is a two-hander collage-text and conflates popular culture's representations of the Columbine Massacre and the attacks on the WTC. I've always called 9-11 "Columbine for Adults"... it's had the same cultural impact, just on a larger, powerful and much more destructive scale. Essentially, two actors perform for each other (and us) in a quasi-erotic, quasi-repulsive fashion, excerpts and reinterpretations of hollywood films, polemic books, youtube footage, news articles, church bulletins, other found materials as well as my own writing all dealing with the two events. The two actors are on "internet dates", so their identities are as fluid as their source materials are slippery... The whole piece layers and collapses like a loud and beautiful engine on overdrive, and the performance takes place in conversation with installed elegant and austere artwork created by Mr. Allegra (who is my husband, btw). The play is asking a ton of questions about "official narratives" and mass media representation, xenophobia and homophobia in contemporary pop culture & political discourse, sexual violence and violent sex. It all sounds terribly academic but I can assure you that the performance was raw, visceral, sexy and full of impact. We had a full house and I'm very encouraged by the responses we received. We're looking to serve it up in New York next year.

I've also been free-writing over the last several years in response to the art and life of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, building a piece tentatively called F**G*T (VANISH). There's so much to consider in approaching a subject as momentous as his biography, but have been bouncing ideas back and forth with the Paris-based performance artist Ben Evans and LA-based playwright Ricardo Bracho to develop the text further into a more refined project.

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 seven I asked my entire family to proceed from the dinner table and come into the basement. I turned out the lights except for one lamp, put on rollerskates and queued up Joan Jett's cover of Gary Glitter's DO YOU WANT TO TOUCH ME on the record player (from a Ktel record compilation I begged my mother to buy at Kmart). I then performed the song in its entirety in a solid-gold inspired routine for them. Queer theater latent in my pre-adolescent bones.

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

A:  More courage, more risk, more access. (I guess that's three things, but they are interrelated into one giant clusterfuck as far as I'm concerned). I guess they could all be lumped under MORE GENEROSITY.

I have "respect" for "respectable" artists but I have unending, geyser-gushing crushes on playwrights who don't compromise their point of view. A play, as I understand it, is not a discreet object. It's not an insect trapped in amber that you can hold in your hand, nor a delicious amuse bouche before your dinner that you shit out tomorrow. A play is an experience, it's never objective nor should we pretend it ever could be. A play is a culture. It's a loose contract that invites a community of people to deliver it into being (which includes audience...Audience as midwife?)... Plays aren't alive until they are off the page, which is why it's so frustrating that so many incredible, smart, difficult plays haven't been produced. The reason is simple: Fear.

I'm always amazed when articles get published giving voice to "concerned playwrights" who speak out to defend "well-crafted plays" from the corruption of messiness, the erosion of form, and a general "descent" into language experimentation. Isn't there a place for everyone? Who are these people and what in god's name are they talking about? If the "well made play" is such an important and powerful object, why does it need defending?

I love and respect plays from the past...I quite enjoy reading and re-reading "classics", but if you look at hallowed texts objectively and not through an historical perspective, its incredibly eye-opening. The lens of history skews perspective. An experimental play competing with a more traditional new play to see the light of day illuminates this conversation on a micro level. Experimentation gets interpreted as a transgression. THIS and NOT THAT. What's interesting to me is this whole conversation about boundaries...what generic boundaries represent and their incredibly problematic and powerful place in this world.

I encourage Joan Retallack's metaphor of art as wager - that the purpose of art is to open up cracks for new possibilities, as opposed to circumscribing and re-inscribing authorized/regimented boundaries. I highly recommend her book THE POETHICAL WAGER. It's been an ethical guide for me as a playwright.

I write plays as a way to coax monsters up from underneath all this shiny surface simplistic "realism"... my husband describes my plays in terms of horror films, and I guess that is correct. Horror is such a powerful genre because it deals with identifying the uncanny, the unauthorized, the unarticulated. Not "THIS and NOT THAT", but "THIS AND THAT" - Jeckyll AND Hyde...writing is like playing with a powerful ouija board... What comes out is so much bigger than me, I can't contain it and I don't want to.

So far, the only way I've been able to get work up is to produce myself. I started Perfect Disgrace Theater after I finished grad school in 2006 in Los Angeles, and moved to Boulder Colorado. I tried sending scripts out across the country to literary departments but nobody was interested, so self-producing it was. I've done everything - fundraising & development, marketing, publicity, production. I made a big splash in a small pond in August 2007, when Josh and I cast Mike Jones in a production of my play, PORRIDGE. Mike was the male escort who outed Ted Haggard, then head of the National Evangelical Association - a powerful lobbyist organization for the Christian Right. By enlisting Mike in the production of the play, which concerned conflated repressed homosexuality in the military with fashion's stranglehold on contemporary culture, among other things, we created a meta-theatrical coup. In total, I've produced four Perfect Disgrace productions in California and Colorado, but am looking to make PD a thriving NYC-based company, after relocating to the city this year.

As for other potentialities, I'm very interested in what's happening in contemporary dance now. Current dance isn't bound by the same strictures as far as narrative goes, it's much blurrier and subjective, so there's an air of possibility - a practical atmosphere of risk and exploration. The boundaries are permeable. At a show at Dance New Amsterdam or Abrons Arts Center, you don't know what you're going to get until it happens in front of you. I'm particularly moved by artists like Trajal Harrell and Jack Ferver for their courage in plunging into subjectivity and its traps. Both artists make pieces that criticize AS they entertain. It's not one or the other.

"Twenty Looks: Paris is Burning at the Judson Church XS" at the New Museum last winter was so inspiring because it challenged assumptions and implicated its audience in such a profound way. Harrell references Jennie Livingston's film about nyc drag houses in the title as a way to create a desire for certain kind of performance (vogue, anyone?) and completely upends that desire by delivering a highly aesthetic, abstract dance piece with atonal soundtrack in the manner of Judson Church stalwarts like Merce Cunningham. When a hip hop loop finally does arrive, it serves as this great confrontational moment. The performance demanded attention and got it, even as it pushed me to consider identity politics vs. formal experimentation and how and who makes that call about which camp a particular piece falls into. Harrell rejects this kind of polemic and says, it's everything and nothing. "A Movie Star Needs A Movie" created invited its audience into an atmosphere of ironic cheese via popular dance forms, and then made a u-turn and dismantled itself into a naked portrait of alienated and insecure selves. Kudos to Jay Wegman and Ben Pryor for programming these and other performances that rode that edge last year, and to PS 122 for doing it this year.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  All of my heroes push for something larger in their work, are frank and not the least bit precious in their writing, but aren't afraid of ambitiously poetic "reaches" -- layering of metaphors, raising the roof (glass ceiling?) on representation, fucking with preconceptions. They ask difficult questions and avoid simple, pat answers. All of the artists below maintain an elegant complexity, are committed to justice in a practical and get-our-hands-dirty way, and are experimental in both form AND content, which, to me, is a sign of courage and, quite honestly, a necessity.

Jean Genet popped my theatrical cherry and Valerie Solanas loaned me a metaphorical gun.

I've learned more from Josh Chambers than any other director. I've had a tough road getting work staged, but Josh has stepped in often as a game collaborator, and his fearless approach to my plays is an incredible gift. I am very much indebted to his courage.

Luis Alfaro's potent greek-inspired plays are thrilling. I saw his Oedipus El Rey at the Boston Court last spring and it left the whole audience smoldering.

Alice Tuan for her great intellect and fantastic sense of humor.

Everett Quinton for his patience and commitment to a life in queer theater.

I checked out the lost films of Charles Ludlam at IFC last winter. Antony Hegarty and Everett introduced the recently rediscovered gems. Antony gave this beautiful speech about the influence a lost generation of artists destroyed by aids has had on our generation coming into our creative own now, and how beautiful and tragic it is that all these beacons from the 80's and 90's aren't physically present to advocate and encourage us... but the work survived and the work still guides. I think contemporary theater would be a more diverse and interesting art-form if many of the lost experimental artists making work during that period were alive today... either teaching and influencing a generation through faculty appointments, or leading us through example in their own growing canon.

A few years ago, I tracked down copies of all the Dar A Luz performances that Adam Soch burned to DVDs, and I return to them for inspiration again and again. Reza Abdoh's influence touches everything I make.

Suzan-Lori Parks -- her BOOK OF GRACE was not received well, but I thought it was incredible. A parable of contemporary American political quagmire, which is probably why it was so harshly criticized. That play should be remounted.

Romeo Castelluci's work takes my breath away. I saw Purgatorio at UCLA Live and it literally moved me to tears - the work was so insanely powerful, gorgeous, and completely committed to investigating very uncomfortable terrain. Half the audience walked out but those who stayed were greatly rewarded. Though his work is image-based, I feel a very strong connection to what he's attempting to articulate.

Harry Kondoleon's VAMPIRES speaks volumes about american hypocrisy and "morality".

Matthew Maguire's influence on my writing process is bedrock - he taught me to look at playwriting as a conversation with the universe..

David Adjmi's plays communicate gorgeousness and horror. Big fan.

Kevin Killian and his Poets Theater in SF are un-fadeable.

Last but not least - Big Art Group are the kindest and smartest provocateurs in NYC. Every person involved in their company is a complete and total sweetheart, and their work will slit your throat. I am in love with them.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind that makes me sweat, tingle, induces tremors and gooseflesh, triggers fight-or-flight instinct. I like work that scares me to death.

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

A:  Write like hell.
Read EVERYTHING you can get your hands on.
Don't be afraid of confusion. It's a writer's friend.
Go swimming and running - get out of your head.
Find blood-siblings, compatriots you respect not for their success but for their bad-ass scripts. Keep these advocates on speed-dial.
Trust your gut.
Keep writing.
Produce yourself, don't wait to be asked to the dance. Produce your compatriots, too.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  On the self-promotion tip:
http://www.perfectdisgrace.com - my theater company.
http://www.solanasonline.com - a webzine i publish with my partner focused on queer artists.

For my peeps:
Jerome Parker's HOUSE OF DINAH will be having a reading this fall in NYC. Location TBA but it will include a full jazz band!
Luis Alfaro's OEDIPUS EL REY plays the Woolly Mammoth next february.
Sigrid Gilmer's AXIOM is a reason to live.
Sibyl O'Malley has a new script called RINGING ARTIFACTS that is melancholy in the best way.
Alana Macias' Zero LIbertad is coming for you.
Trajal Harrell is performing at Prelude for free next week!
PS 122's fall season is going to be KILLER, so get a passport for $55 (which gets you into 5 shows!)
In November, I will be at BAM's NEXT WAVE to devour THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN. Will you?