I Interview Playwrights Part 280: Elaine Romero

Elaine Romero

Hometown: San Juan Capistrano, CA. This is a complicated question. I’ve spent many years in Tucson, Ariz., and my husband and I still own a home there. We’ve relocated to Chicago where I teach at Northwestern University.

Current Town: Chicago, IL.

Q:  Tell me about Wetback.

A:  A lifetime of border experience culminated for me in Wetback. My play tells the story of a hate crime against a Mexican immigrant and implicates the Latina, Amalia, who fails to protect him. Amalia is a high school principal, an educator, who has employed and housed an undocumented worker for many years. She fires him when she fears for her job. I’m exploring the big questions for Chicanos/Mexican-Americans. What is our relationship/responsibility to the Mexican immigrant? Do we have any? And now that my home state of Arizona has upped the ante with their anti-Mexican laws, what do Mexican-Americans do? What’s our moral responsibility to the people in a region that once belonged to Mexico?

I’ve spent the last many years living close to the border in Tucson, Ariz. and I grew up close to the border in California. My grandparents lived in San Diego, so we always had to go through a border checkpoint to visit them from Orange County. There’s a certain psychological terror that looms around border checkpoints for me. As a result, the Border Patrol/La Migra has never been far from my psyche. The last few years I’ve split my time between Los Angeles and Arizona. I’ve watched the Southwest border transform from tolerant to intolerant in a matter of a decade. It seems just a couple months ago that Lou Dobbs still had his nightly anti-Mexican rant on CNN. Even liberal politicians lobby for the Great Wall of China—Southwest. Even Obama is sending 1200 troops to guard the border. So, what does a Latina playwright do? The recent reelection Gov. Jan Brewer raises the possibility of immigrant camps/prisons along the border.

I’ve felt in my bones that our border tensions would result in violence. I received a commission, alongside Mexican playwright, Berta Hiriart, to write a short piece about the border. That’s when I first started getting the early rumblings of the play, though I’ve been taking notes on a play that involved the Minuteman Militia for many years. I’d initially thought I’d expose their roots with the KKK, then I opted for a Chicana point of view, and to point the finger within, at the Latina character. I reconceived the play as a full-length story. I took that through a rigorous process at the Lark New Play Development Center. I should list them under Hometown! Then, I had an opportunity to spend a week with professional actors and director, Samantha K. Wyer, through Voice &Vision’s ENVISION Retreat. They fed us the most amazing food and supported us in the most profound way. I wrote like a maniac, drafted and deleted scenes, worked tightly with a top-notch team. I questioned every line. I got as far as I could in that week. Samantha and I took the play to Voices at the River at Arkansas Repertory Theatre and I kept digging and adding scenes, and deleting. We had another amazing workshop and I uncovered deeper layers of the story that really excited me. Arkansas Repertory Theatre, and, now, Urban Stages and the Invisible Theatre, have really stepped up to the plate with Wetback by giving me more developed time through staged readings. A play sympathetic to the Mexican point-of-view is sadly controversial at this moment in time. I’ve lost a lot of sleep over Wetback because I feel the immediacy of it. Today is the day for this piece.

As a side note, and perhaps as a primary note, a couple days after I finished my first draft of Wetback, Mexican immigrant, Luis Ramirez, was murdered in a hate crime in a Pennsylvania park. The murder shares eerie similarities with my piece. He was murdered because he openly loved a white woman in a park. Ramirez was murdered by skinheads. My character dies at the hands of a member of the Minuteman Militia. I don’t know if a political event has hit me quite so hard when I realized life had imitated my art. My soul is crying for Luis Ramirez in ways it has not cried before. In some sort of spiritual retroactive way, I believe the play was written for him.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I’ve been working on Ponzi with Kitchen Dog Theatre through a commission with NNPN. Far beyond Madoff, Ponzi schemes have unraveled all over the world since the economic collapse. Recently, I received this ridiculous gift of several weeks on the Manasota Key at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida. They gave me a place on the beach and I slept to the sound of the waves. In the mornings, I’d walk the beach, collecting shark teeth and getting myself into a meditative mode to write. I started Ponzi originally at the Lark’s Winter Retreat. It’s a three-actor play that deals with three recent acquaintances, money, power, and sex. I’ve been drawn to the idea of how we permit money or status to define us and who we are, as humans, at our core when one of our identities slips away. The main character, Catherine, grapples with the issue of whether or not the money she has inherited she can be loved for who she really is, or if all her relationships are colored by her inheritance. I’ve boiled it down to the statement: is it easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich woman to be loved for who she is? I think in many ways Catherine unconsciously wants to unburden herself of her money to see who she really is——to see if she can really float on her own? She’s always controlled her world through sex because she doesn’t trust she can be loved. But her sexual power has always stemmed from her economic power. When she loses her wealth in a Ponzi scheme, she has absolutely no idea who she is and if she can survive. We presented it in June at Kitchen Dog’s New Works Festival. We explored time in Ponzi. I’d written the play with three different structures. I’ve landed on a good one, and added some live video and slides. The play just won an Edgerton Fund for New American Plays Award. We are premiering it at Kitchen Dog Theatre in the spring. We’re looking for partners for the Continued Life Fund, so I’m putting the word out to theatres.

I spent the lion’s share of last year working on The Dalai Lama is Not Welcome Here for InterAct Theatre Company through their 20/20 Commission Program. Again, the world economy plays a role in this one. I’m interested in how the personal fits into the global, and in the ways the two collide. In this play an American couple lose their young son to a defective Chinese toy. When the husband gets a job in Shanghai, China, the wife seeks to destroy the small toy manufacturer who made the toy. When she succeeds, she tries to undo what can’t be undone. Writing Dalia Lama shoot me straight into my bone marrow. The play comes from such a deep place of grief and moral confusion. I broke my heart to write it. Kate, the protagonist, is a Medea of sorts. I have a difficult time even reading the play without being overwhelmed by the feeling of loss. And yet, as in many of my pieces, I’m interested in a non-religious redemption, the question of whether or not one can forgive the unforgivable.

I have a short play, A Simple Snow, which premiered at the InsparTO Festival in Toronto last spring. It won their contest. It’s also been shortlisted for Short+Sweet Sydney. The play takes place inside a snow globe. I got the idea when I saw a photograph of an Amish carriage on a postcard while I was doing a residency in Lanesboro, Minnesota. It’s been an odd little play to crack. We Skyped rehearsals in Toronto, which was great. I think my producer, director, and the whole team had been fascinated with the puzzle of how to make that play work. And, for me, it was thrilling to have people say that they didn’t know if it could or would work, but that they want to take the risk of exploring it with me. Sometimes I think it’s the most theatrical plays that scare us the most. The play was presented in their Best of the Fest week, so I felt sure we’d achieved our goal with that premiere.

In addition to these plays, I’ve just written a screenplay for Back Fence Productions. It’s an adoption story that involves a concomitant mythical world that the adoptee creates for survival. I’m working with producer Terry Chase Chenowith.

I just finished an adaptation of SUN, STONE, AND SHADOWS for Arkansas Repertory Theatre. It was neat to adapt fiction and to work with my own translation from the Spanish.

Now, I’m feeling the rumbles of a new play and looking for the right company to commission 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 have three brothers. We once discovered a fossilized whale skeleton when we were children. We went home and got a bunch of Hefty trash bags and collected the fossils. I gave the fossils to my friend’s father because he was a geologist. I told him I was giving him the fossils for “carbon dating.” I figured he had a lab and that he could do that part of the job. Hah! I’ve always had an investigative mind, and I’ve always wanted to get to the bottom of everything that could be known. For me, playwriting is an act of excavation. It can be an excavation of my own psyche, or a political or social dynamic. Having three brothers has defined me in many ways. First, because they’re brilliant, and keeping up, has kept my mind flying, but secondly, it has caused me to write about gender dynamics.

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

A:  I love producers who trust their taste and don’t merely replicate what others do. I would populate the world with them.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Harold Pinter hands down. And Williams. I’m attracted to writers of conscience like Kushner and Miller. I’m drawn into the worlds of Paula Vogel and Sarah Ruhl. I’m always excited to see new work by Octavio Solis, Carlos Murillo, and Annie Baker. And Beckett. Never forget Beckett.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I love adventures in language that delve deeply into character and story. I love broken hearts. I love plays that aren’t afraid to feel. I love characters who find themselves in moral conflicts. I love gray. I like the hard questions. I’m a fan of politics that have been humanized and dramatized. I think there’s a way to write a strong political play without landing in agit prop land. I delight in the balancing act of that. I want to have as much empathy for my antagonists as my protagonists. I love the quandary of being challenged to love someone I hate.

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

A:  There seems to be a desire for instant mastery or recognition. Sustained playwriting careers take time to build. And trust me, you don’t want to burn too brightly and out quickly before you’ve found your voice. Be aggressive, but be patient. Keep learning. Support your colleagues. Go to the wall for somebody else every day. I’ve done that on NEA panels and been the only voice saying so and now those playwrights are famous. Fight for the words you believe in whether they’re yours or somebody else’s. Believe there’s enough to go around. Be humble.

Lots of amazing people will be here

You should go too--

On Monday, November 15th the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation is honoring Jules Feiffer, the great cartoonist and humorist, with a benefit at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Jules will perform a one-man show called Jules Feiffer: Funny Side Up.  This is a one-night only event that has never been performed on Broadway. 

Special appearances will be made by Robert Klein, Bill Irwin, Mike Nichols, Eric Bogosian, Marsha Norman and Michael Weller.

Jules will take the audience through a retrospective of his career as a cartoonist, screenwriter, playwright and author while showcasing giant images of his comic strips and other artwork – some never before seen in public.

Tickets are now in short supply.  If you would like to attend act fast while seats are still available.  Tickets can be purchased at Telecharge.com.

More information can be obtained by clicking here.

I Interview Playwrights Part 279: Alexis Clements

Alexis Clements

Hometown:  Not applicable. I’m an Army brat, so I call the place I’m living home. But I did spend most of my childhood at a couple different addresses in Northern Virginia, in the suburbs outside Washington, DC.

Current Town:  Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’ve got a couple of projects cooking at the moment. First and foremost, I’m working on building a tour of my performance piece Conversation, which I premiered at this year’s Philadelphia Fringe Festival. We had a great run there and I’m working on bringing it around to a few different cities in 2011. It’s written and performed by me, and it’s about a woman who is working on developing a theory of conversation in which each person gets exactly what they want from the other person. The main character begins to present this theory to the audience, but things start to go awry very quickly. The Philadelphia audience really responded to it, so I’m looking forward to bringing it to other spots and seeing how different audiences react to it.

I’m also continuing to develop Spitting Against the Wind, a piece I presented early iterations of at Dixon Place and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. It’s a performance piece in which I play the role of Benjamin Franklin, who has, it turns out, been alive ever since the 1790s, and spent most of the past 200 years or so trekking across Asia. The story is a challenge to the myths that have grown up around Franklin and an interrogation of why we want to believe those myths. It’s also a piece that’s stretching me artistically—it’s got storytelling, movement, and an aesthetic that’s gonna push me in some new directions.

And early next year I’ll be doing a dog-sledding trip in Norway, in the style of Roald Amundsen’s 1910 trek to Antarctica. Yes, seriously. I can’t quite believe it myself. But it’s all part of the research for a show I’m working on, Terra Incognita, about an Antarctic cartographer.

So, I’ve got my hands full, but with good things, I think.

Q:  Tell me about Out of Time & Place.

A:  Out of Time & Place is a two-volume anthology of plays written by 11 members of the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab, myself included. The Women’s Project published the books late this summer and I edited them, along with the playwright Christine Evans. The books have this dead-on introduction by Theresa Rebeck, then there are essays preceding each play giving you a sense of the context out of which each grew. But the meat of the books is the 11 plays by 11 very different, very strong voices. There’s quite a range of writing, from a piece challenging notions of identity among a group of six Muslim women living in Cape Town, written by the London-based South African writer Nadia Davids; to the play that won this year’s NY Innovative Theater Award for Outstanding Full Length Script—Crystal Skillman’s The Vigil or The Guided Cradle; to my own piece, Conversation. I’m pretty proud of these books and am glad to be able to offer them to the theater community.

It’s a project that grew out of the discussions that started gaining steam in the last couple years around the question of how to achieve gender parity in the theater. Julia Jordan, Sarah Schulman and Anna Zigler hosted a couple of town halls on the subject in 2008 and 2009, and then the group 50/50 in 2020, whose goal is to achieve gender parity by the year 2020, had their first meeting in the second half of 2009. So, I was going to these meetings, and listening to the dismal statistics being quoted and some of the unfortunate stories being told, and I started asking some questions of myself. I was thinking about what my experience was, as a playwright and also as someone who regularly writes about theater and performance art for print publications here in New York. I also started to look further back, to my experience as a young person, falling in love with theater and performance art in high school and college.

As I was thinking about those first experiences of theater, I remembered this small bookshelf of plays in the green room of the theater in my high school, the first place I ever picked up an actual play script. And though my memory does not have the crispness of Google’s Streetview, I can say with some certainty that pretty much all of the plays on that shelf were by white European and American men. Things changed a bit in college, when the required texts started to include the occasional woman and minority writer, but it was still rare to be in a classroom where contemporary work by woman and minorities was being discussed..

I connected those experiences with comments being made at those teaching in universities who were saying that they couldn’t find published contemporary work by women to put in front of their students. And, even more perturbing, the assertion by some people working in theater that there simply weren’t plays written by women being offered to them for production. All of this, for me, pointed clearly to a need for publication, to fill the gaps and to counter the recurring false assertions by disingenuous (at best) individuals who would prefer that the world believes that women aren’t writing strong work for the stage (let alone any other medium).

And, to be honest, I really admired these women that I shared two years with in the Women’s Project Lab program. They are a pretty remarkable group. I wanted to find a way to honor that group, and this was a great way to do that while also addressing the above goals.

I should also mention that for those of you in the New York City area, there’s going to be a book launch event at the Drama Book Shop on Dec. 3 from 5-7. Eight of the writers featured in the books will be on hand, presenting excerpts from their work and also telling the stories behind their plays. Learn more here: http://www.outoftimeandplace.com/official-book-launch-event/

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

A:  Oh, man. That is a really tough question. Makes me wonder what my parents would answer if someone asked them. I have the notion to call them right now and ask them, but unfortunately, it’s quite late as I’m answering these questions, so it’ll have to wait. I know that my father recently reminded me that I’ve been putting on shows since I was wee little thing, so that’s clearly been part of who I am for as long as I’ve been.

In lieu of a specific tale, I’ll give you instead an image of me as a young child that I think speaks volumes.

We rented this one house, when we first moved to Northern Virginia, on Amherst Avenue. I must have been about five years old at the time, kindergarten and first grade—the best time for kids, I think, or at least it was for me, besides that one preschool in Florida, but that’s another story. Anyhow, there are all sorts of memories that I have from that house, but one of the things that came to mind when thinking of your question is the sun porch off the side of the house where my mother had her big old roll-top desk pushed up against the wall and she used to sit for hours sorting out bills and all manner of other things. She had a calculator that she would type away at faster than I could ever imagine typing, and neat piles of papers and forms, and envelopes and paper clips and pens and all these important looking things.

And then, over in one corner of the sun porch, facing the opposite direction, was a little kid-sized table and chair, where I carefully created my own piles of important looking things. I would get my teachers to give me the extra worksheets they had left over after everyone in the class had gotten their copies and I would also collect piles of blank paper or blank forms that needed filling out. And so my mom would sit up there at her big roll-top desk doing her work, and I would sit down at my little desk in the corner, doing my own work—checking boxes on lengthy forms and solving addition and subtraction problems and jotting down ideas I had. And all the while the sun would be streaming in on us through the jalousie windows, and the birds would be stealing the cherries from the neighbor’s cherry tree near the fence in the backyard, and the crabapples would be making a mess in the front yard, and cars would be driving up and down the Avenue. And then my brother would come home, or my dad would come home, and work time would be over. But for some portion of many of the days we lived in that house, my mom and I would sit and do our work together on the sun porch—me doing my best and most earnest imitation of productivity.

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

A:  To include more women and minorities in all arenas of professional theater-making.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Laurie Anderson, Robert LePage, Melanie Joseph and The Foundry Theatre, David Greenspan, Peggie Shaw, Penny Arcade, Holly Hughes, Spalding Gray, Martha Clarke, Luigi Pirandello, Tennessee Williams…I could go on.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I’m pretty partial to experimental work and work that bleeds across genres, particularly stuff that takes some of its cues from the visual arts tradition of performance art. But I also love a good story and I love a great performer, regardless of the category of theater it is.

When it comes down to it, though, the thing that makes a live performance work for me is the sense of magic it contains. Performance always involves smoke and mirrors, to some extent, and that’s what makes it amazing and so powerful when it works. When you walk into the theater you know you’re going to be deceived. You’ve paid for the privilege of it. There’s nothing worse than a show where nothing is left to the imagination, where every detail is painstakingly rendered, where my role as an audience member is entirely passive—there are plenty of other mediums I could turn to for that.

Even in the most punishing performance art, there’s a contract established between the performer and the audience that is typically predicated on creating a new world of possibility inside the performance space for some period of time. That is a powerful agreement, and an amazing opportunity to rewrite the rules of the known world, if only temporarily. And while many other art forms can create new worlds, they don’t have to manufacture it for you live, in real-time, and make you not only want to believe what’s happening, but also let yourself into that world to await an unknown result.

To me that represents a kind of magic that can only be achieved in performance. Some of the most satisfying performance pieces I’ve ever seen I’ve walked away wondering how it was possible, how they did what they did, or what exactly it was that just happened to me.

So deceive me. I asked for it.

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

A:  Get to know your colleagues. As much as writing is a solo sport for most of us, performance is most assuredly a team sport. The team sport mentality didn’t come naturally to me when I first began writing, but by participating in programs like the Playwrights Forum in Washington, DC, and the Dramatists Guild Fellowship program, and the Women’s Project Lab, I started to have a sense that I had colleagues, and that I didn’t always have to view myself as in competition with them, which can be a difficult thing when you’re an ambitious young writer.

And beyond that, when you go see shows, keep an eye out for designers whose work you admire, directors who fire you up, actors who you love. You need a team and you should know who you want on it.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The most important plug at the moment is for everyone to have a look at Out of Time & Place. It’s meant to be, not only a great collection of writing for performance, but also a resource for professors looking for contemporary work to teach in the classroom, particularly contemporary work by women. It’s also a fantastic source of material for actors seeking new monologues and scenes.

Get copies and learn more about the books at www.outoftimeandplace.com

You can also keep up with the other projects I’m working on at www.alexisclements.com (where you can also sign up for my mailing list).

I Interview Playwrights Part 278: Lila Rose Kaplan

Lila Rose Kaplan

Hometown: Mamaroneck, NY

Current Town: Usually Santa Barbara. Frequently Los Angeles. Sometimes New York.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’ve got a couple plays brewing. WE ALL FALL DOWN is about a family of cultural Jews attempting to have their first Passover Seder. It’s a dark comedy, like most families, and it’s my first play with an intermission. Then there’s THE LIGHT PRINCESS, which is a musical for young people or people who remember being young. I’m working with a fantastic composer named Mike Pettry. We adapted the story from an old British fairy tale about a Princess who is born with no gravity. My play 100 PLANES is about two female pilots in the Air Force. It explores how women treat each other in the workplace. I’ve been developing this play with The Lark in NYC and we have a Studio Retreat coming up in February. Finally, I'm starting something brand new. Like in utero new. I’m developing it as part of the Center Theatre Group Writers Workshop in Los Angeles. It may have something to do with twins. It may have something to do with quantum entanglement. It may be about personal hygiene. I have pages due next week. We shall see.

Q:  Tell me about WILDFLOWER

A:  WILDFLOWER is a play that I wrote during my second year in grad school. I heard about a Wildflower Hotline in San Diego and I was intrigued. How could flowers be urgent enough for a hotline? When does something beautiful become dangerous? And then it hit me. Adolescence. Adolescence is when something beautiful becomes dangerous. So, WILDFLOWER explores the discovery of desire and its consequences. It's about the adolescent in all of us. Chris Burney from Second Stage saw the UCSD production of WILDFLOWER and two years later he produced it as part of their Uptown Series. It was a beautiful production directed by Giovanna Sardelli. It was thrilling to have my Off-Broadway debut surrounded by such a supportive and talented team. WILDFLOWER is now available through DPS if you’re interested in reading it.

Q:  Tell me about your current residency

A:  I am the very first Playwright-In-Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theorectical Physics at UCSB. It’s pretty cool. There are some amazing characters walking around. Yesterday I met a man who works for the Bureau of Standards, which is in charge of universal measurements. They keep track of things like the meter and the kilogram and the volt. The man I met is in charge of the second. He makes sure our measurement of the second is as precise as it can be. It’s fantastic what people are working on at Kavli. I’m collecting wonderful ideas for future plays. I’m also leading seminars that teach scientists how to craft their talks into compelling stories and how to be good storytellers for different audiences. It’s an inspiring place to be.

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 father took me to the beach when I was little. I think I was about 3 or 4. My scientific father tried to explain the food chain to me. He told me that the sharks eat the big fish and the big fish eat the little fish and the little fish eat the plants. I pondered it all for a while and then I asked, “But Daddy, what does the beach eat?”

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

A:  I long for an accessible theatre, an affordable theater, and an immediate theatre. When I used to direct, I loved working for an outdoor Shakespeare company that performed in local parks all over New York. The shows were free and they were in neighborhoods where people lived. The neighborhood kids would come see the shows every night. It was magical.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Thornton Wilder, Tony Kushner, Sarah Ruhl, Paula Vogel, Anne Bogart, Maria Irene Fornes, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Steven Sondheim, Tom Stoppard, Julie Taymor, Caryl Churchill, Jose Riveria...to name a few.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that pulls me in and holds me close. Theatre that’s surprising. Theatre that’s messy. Theatre that’s beautiful. Theatre that collides language and characters and story and music and movement in unexpected ways. Theatre that isn’t afraid to be theatre.

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

A:  See as much live theatre as you can. See dance and music too.

Find other playwrights and share your plays and experiences.

Find collaborators you love and make things with them as often as you can.

Live a life outside the theatre. You’ll have more to write about.

Take walks.

Leave time for daydreaming.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Get your own copy of WILDFLOWER at DPS http://www.dramatists.com/cgi-bin/db/single.asp?key=4156

Check out 100 PLANES at the Lark on February 17-18 http://www.larktheatre.org/events/10-11_season.htm

Check out The Playwrights Union in Los Angeles http://playwrightsunion.com/

Check out the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu

I Interview Playwrights Part 277: Barry Levey

Barry Levey

Hometown: Beachwood, OH.

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  Tell me about All The Way From China.

A:  It's is a thriller about three people greiving an unsolved murder. Ars Nova and the New Group did readings, and it's now the inaugural production of the Mad Dog theater company at the Gene Frankel Theater. The central conflict is between Jack, who dropped out of college last year when his girlfriend was killed, and Ralph, a classmate who shows up claiming to have new information about the crime. The play asks how close someone has to be to a tragedy to be entitled to mourn it. How do we share our grief, how do we hoard it, and how far might we go to claim our part?

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  Woman of Troy, a comedy about the women who wrote the Iliad. I pitch it as Shakespeare in Love meets Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses. Bycatch, a sort-of sequel to Moby-Dick in which Ahab and Ishmael both survive the sinking of the Pequod and time-travel through two hundred years of American overfishing. And I'm updating my one-man show Hoaxocaust! for production in 2011. It's about a young Jewish man disaffected by Israeli policies who longs to separate his ethnicity, religion and politics. He decides the only thing yoking him to Zionism is the inconvenient fact of the Holocaust, and goes on a journey to interview (real) Holocaust deniers around the world.

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 picked my scabs.

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

A:  Ticket prices. My friends and I are among the most passionate supporters of theater in the world--and even we decide what to see based on where we can get comped. What does that say about attracting audience members from outside our community? I realize this is just one head of the hydra that is theater economics, but I do think that subsidized ticket programs, pay-what-you can previews, and similar intiatives need to be replicated and advertised as widely as possible.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Sondheim. I am a playwright because of two things: (1) the first national tour of Into the Woods; and (2) Young Playwrights Inc.

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

A:  Write everyday and call yourself a writer. Read books, see plays, and watch TV--know your fellow travelers. Realize that you're as unlikely to find ultimate fulfillment in being a playwright as a laywer is in being an attorney. Have a hobby. Have friends and family outside the business. Have a teleplay.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  China goes up November 10-21: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/131764. And people can join the Hoaxocaust Facebook group to hear about future productions: http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=200072398048

I Interview Playwrights Part 276: Michael I. Walker

Michael I. Walker

Hometown: Easton, PA

Current Town: NYC

Q:  Tell me about Letter from Algeria.

A:  Letter from Algeria is a play I started working on in 2007, right after my play Blackout had a run Off Broadway. The play has been developed with Ground UP Productions for the past year. They first selected the show as part of their new works reading series, From The Ground UP. Then they were able to produce a fully staged workshop production at UNC, Chapel Hill this summer, which was a rare and fantastic opportunity to learn about the show outside of New York. It is exciting to complete the circle with Ground UP with this production at the Abingdon, back in NYC.

Letter from Algeria tells the story of three American college students studying abroad in Belgium who meet a wealthy older gentleman and wind up going to his estate in Algeria, where things don’t exactly go well. The show comes from many places, including my love of a lot of literature written in or about Algeria, like Camus’ The Stranger, and André Gide’s The Immoralist. I also love exploring settings where normal social rules don’t apply, and living abroad, even temporarily, resets perceptions for people. We try to start anew in a new location, whether that means reinventing ourselves entirely, or just forging new relationships and bonds at a quicker pace than is normally reasonable. This can be really fun and funny, but also have rather unexpected and sometimes tragic consequences. I hope the play is like that – fun, funny, unexpected, and tragic.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  Besides writing plays, I work on musical theater with a composer, Kyle Ewalt. We have a number of projects at the moment, but the next up is Bromance: The Dudesical. It’s rather different from Letter from Algeria. Can you tell from the title? It’s a really fun show about dudes being dudes, and it definitely does not have a tragic ending. We’re doing it next on Wednesday, December 1st at Caroline’s On Broadway. It’s very cool to bring the show to a venue that’s not traditionally seen as a space for theater, even though it’s in the heart of Times Square. But as a comedy club, it is definitely a place that guys go – without even having to be dragged by their girlfriends!

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 a childhood actor. That’s my dirtiest secret, although I tell people all the time, so apparently, I’m not very good at keeping secrets. When I was ten, my parents’ friend worked for an agent who convinced them to let me go to an audition for Annie II, a big sequel heading to Broadway. None of us knew what we were doing, especially my parents, but I was little, had red hair, and thought it all seemed incredibly fun. Somehow that pluckiness got me a role in the show, on my first ever audition. Suddenly, in a matter of weeks, I was rehearsing for a huge Broadway show, which a few weeks after that turned into an infamous Broadway flop. So by ten I was both on Broadway and unemployed – in other words, I had a true theatrical career. But the craziness of it all also cemented my heart in the theater. Over time, that love turned to writing, so I could tell stories I felt were important.

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

A:  The thing that most concerns me for the future of theater is that the financial model for making theater, especially new theater, is broken. Small, wonderful companies like Ground UP (who is producing Letter from Algeria) have such a hard time producing new work because of the high cost. There are lots of reasons for that, but until we figure out new ways of raising money, lowering ticket costs, and most importantly finding new, excited, young, diverse audiences, I don’t know that things will improve. And it’s not really better on a more commercial level – even Broadway. I am most excited for people working in the theater who are willing to take risks and explore new ideas, not just on stage, but also in how to bring good material to the stage.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I hope these folks don’t seem too obvious, but Tony Kushner, Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, and John Guare have been four of my favorite playwrights since I was a teenager.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I get excited by work that embraces theater as a collective experience. I mean this both for the audience and for the artists creating the work. No play is created in a vacuum. Putting a show up on stage is, by definition, a collaboration, which is a lot of what makes making theater so exciting. And an audience's experience hopefully reflects that communal approach. A community came together to tell this story. Another community is created as people watch and absorb the story at the same time. In its greatest moments, that feeling of commonality is palpable both under the stage lights and out into the darkened seats. I think this can happen most often with theater that is somehow political, socio-political, or at least has an urgent, ardent voice that needs to be heard. I can remember going to the closing night performance of Angels In America on Broadway when I was in high school. My sister and I had no idea it was the last show when we got the tickets, we just wanted to see Perestroika before it was too late. When we arrived, the audience felt electric. The actors passionately delivered gut wrenching final performances. Kushner spoke after the show and asked who hadn’t seen the play before. My sister and I were the only people in the audience to raise their hands. But we understood what a cathartic experience everyone else in the theater had been through, because we felt it too. The act of watching the play, the performance of the play, and the message of the play came together like magic. We all went through something together for several hours, and we all came out differently at the end. When it works, when everyone watching a show senses that synergy, it is the greatest, most transformative artistic experience I know.

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

A:  I think persistence is the number one quality needed to be a successful playwright. Keep writing, and keep plugging away at the business of writing. It’s such a long road, it sometimes feels impossible to get your work in front of an audience, but you never know where an opportunity may come from. And of course, there are things you can learn to help you get there quicker, or at least easier. It’s important to know what size show is producible, what companies are out there producing new work, and what type of theater those companies are interested in. Ultimately, however, you can only control so many things in terms of getting your play produced. But you can always control how much care and craft go into your writing. Be practical to give yourself advantages in getting produced, but be true to your artistic vision and voice in your work. Great writing will find a way to be heard – believe in that, persistently.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  You can find more about Bromance and the Caroline’s concert on our website: www.ewaltandwalker.com. You can find more info about Letter from Algeria and how to get tickets on Ground UP’s website: www.groundupproductions.org. Letter from Algeria is running at the Abingdon Theater until November 20th.