I Interview Playwrights Part 339: Daniel Pearle

Daniel Pearle

Hometown: Studio City, CA

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  At the end of this month Primary Stages is doing a reading of a play called Bel Canto that I started last spring. I'm very excited to hear it out loud for the first time. I'm also starting to work on a play about the kindergarten admissions process in Manhattan.

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 came to playwriting pretty late. As a kid I used to draw constantly, then around age ten I gave that up and started taking piano lessons. In middle and high school I trained as a singer and did some music composition stuff too. When I started writing it was mostly short stories; it wasn't until college that I took a playwriting course for the first time. I know that's not really a story exactly, but I think what I've always liked about theater is that it's a medium that's visual, musical, textual, and psychological. I love the freedom that comes with starting something new, knowing it can be pretty much anything I want. I guess I'm still a little ADD...

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

A:  I studied in Paris for a semester as an undergraduate and I couldn't believe how much the government there subsidized theater. As a student I could see a show for five euros. Even regular tickets weren't usually more than 30-50. I wish that was the case here.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Chekhov, Williams, John Patrick Shanley, Caryl Churchill, Craig Lucas, Christopher Shinn. Oh, and Shakespeare.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that's authentic, imaginative, and personal, whatever form that takes. Very often I feel like plays are written to try to be clever or interesting or wild, to try to impress an audience rather than to give them an experience. I think I'm most excited when I feel like a play has cost the writer something to write.

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

A:  I'm still looking for advice myself... But the best advice I've gotten is to write the play you'd write if you thought no one would ever read it.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  As part of their Primetime Reading series, Primary Stages is doing a reading of my play Bel Canto on April 25th. Details here: http://www.primarystages.org/primetime.

Also, I just saw Christopher Shinn's Picked at the Vineyard. Highly recommend it!

I Interview Playwrights Part 338: Heather Lynn MacDonald

Heather Lynn MacDonald

Hometown: Tuftonboro, NH (Lake Winnipesaukee)

Current Town: New York, NY

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I'm working on a play about the history of the neoconservatives. It's been a few years actually - I'll do a ton of research, then write, then I freeze up and put it away for a while. I've found the fact vs. fiction balance tricky - some of my characters are living public figures. I'm almost there, though.


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 12 I was cast as Oliver in my local community theater production of Oliver. 6 years later at NYU I was cast as Macbeth in a class production. Do I play a man particularly well? No. Those were accidents, but they informed my point of view when I became a writer. I started out naïvely thinking men's and women's roles could be fluid. But many of the plays I read by women felt narrow - anything domestic and I was completely turned off. The 'woman writer' stamp became a kiss of death for me. So I overcompensated and wrote plays without women at all. The few women that would appear were angry, stuck, or cried for no reason. I had a distorted view.

Now I'm in my 30's and all I can think about are women's issues. I want to see plays about them. I want to write about them. I'm no clearer on how to do it in a way that doesn't feel 'woman writer'-stamped, but I suspect that will be an ongoing question for me.

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

A: Oh this is so hard. But I'll give three.

1. I wish it wasn't so expensive to produce new plays in New York. In the early 90's when I first came to the city, you could see a show for cheap at any number of theaters downtown. If it was a hit, it might move or play for a while, and if it was a bomb, you'd just pack it up and roll out the next one. The financial stakes were lower.

2. I wish we were less precious about theater.

3. I wish theater was more integrated with visual arts and/or live music (the Sam Shepard piece at the New Group last season is one example that comes to mind).

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:

Caryl Churchill
Harold Pinter
Rich Maxwell
Fiona Shaw
Tom Stoppard

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

A: Submit your work. Find the right opportunities for you, and apply. Repeatedly. People will remember you, even if you didn't get it the first time. Or second. Or third.

The Atlantic Theater has the rejection letter they sent Tony Kushner for Angels in America up in their office. Rejection letters are not a referendum on your work.

Q: Plugs, please:

A: Mark Rylance in Jerusalem

I Interview Playwrights Part 337: Gabe McKinley

Gabe McKinley

Hometown:

I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and also spent a lot of time in Europe, mostly in Majorca, Spain. My father was a professor and we traveled a lot, but I was in KC for high school, and my extended family is there, so I consider it home.

Current Town:

Well, as I write this, I'm in Los Angeles...being the literary equivalent of the guys who hang out in front of Lowe's waiting for work, hoping somebody will drive up, point to me, and ask me to write an episode of the Chicago Code or some such. But, that being said, I've been living in New York since coming there to study acting at NYU in the 90's.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Currently I'm writing a film for an independent producer, and I'm pretty excited about it. Theater wise, I have a new play that is making the rounds with theater companies in New York. The play, CQ/CX, is about a plagiarism scandal at a New York newspaper. We recently had a great reading for a theater company and we're waiting for someone to give the show and opportunity. Otherwise, aside from looking for television work, I've been doing sketches and working on two new plays, one is a dark comedy about a effects of a celebrity's sex tape on a couple's relationship, and the other, still in its infancy, is an epic romance...or, at least, my version of.

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've had either the honor or horror, depending on your point of view, of being surrounded by writers my entire life. My parents, who are both writers, and their friends, most of whom are writers, poets and painters, had a great effect on me from a very early age. I spent a lot of time at poetry readings and writers conferences and I'd stay up late and listen to my parents and their friends talk about the books they loved and others they were writing and I think it seeped into my brain at an early age that writing was a noble profession and that, perhaps, one day i'd like to join it. I can think of no singular moment or event that made me a writer... but, I often think about my father's typewriter in his studio, it was a big old lug of thing and he had taped a small piece of paper with the word "truth" written on it. I think of that yellowed piece of paper and it's simple message when I sit down to write and then I try to write one truthful thing after another.

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

A:  More money for artists.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  As an American playwright, I fell in love with Eugene O'Neill first, and I still hold him dear. Checkov, of course, and Georg Buchner. Mamet, Shepard, August Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Pinter, Bond, Osborne, Kushner, Kennedy, Kane and Parks.... there are a lot of great writers I steal from, I could go on and on.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Honest and brave works... and not brave in the sense of shocking, but rather, just brutally truthful. Great writing is a bloodletting, and I think great theater is the same.

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

A:  John Guare said something about never getting a job, but in this economy...that's moot. So, I'll say...read everything, not just plays, but fiction, nonfiction, newspapers, magazines, both prose and poetry. Reading is writing. Also, GO TO THE THEATER! I'm always surprised when I speak to writer who doesn't make the effort to get to the theater.

I Interview Playwrights Part 336: Keith Josef Adkins

Keith Josef Adkins

Hometown: the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio

Current Town: Harlem and Brooklyn.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Currently, I'm in rewrites for a play called The Final Days of Negro-ville. A darkly humorous play that examines our current recession and its impact on middle class "black America". Think Our Town meets Osage County meets a black middle class community falling apart at the seams. The play was commissioned by A.C.T. and the Hansberry Project in Seattle and I'm prepping for a July 2011 workshop. I'm also in rewrites for a play called Sugar and Needles. The play, also dark and humorous, (I obviously enjoy dark and humorous), digs into the lives of two recovering substance abusers and the woman who knocks on their door with a bag of coke (among other things). The play was inspired by the life of my oldest brother, a witty, charming, very smart man, who died in September 2010 from complications due to a lifetime of substance abuse. Sugar and Needles was commissioned by Epic Theater and will appear in their Sunshine Series, June 2011.

Q:  Tell me about The New Black Fest.

A:  The New Black Fest is a theater festival that celebrates the diverse voices, music and narratives within the global black theater canon. It is a means to challenge black theater artists and the larger theater community to think about "blackness" in a much more expansive way. It is a creative supplement to what appears to be a "whitening" of American theater. (Let's count how many plays of color were produced in this off-Broadway season). My maternal grandfather was a leader in the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP. My paternal grandfather, a minister, was very good friends with the Civil Rights leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Both of these men demonstrated if you see a void, do whatever you can to fill that void, explain later. At the end of the day, J. Holtham and I like to believe The New Black Fest is our way to provide opportunities and legitimacy to theater artists of color who spend most of their careers stuck in that stagnant waiting game.

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

A:  In the 1970s, a major Born Again movement swept through southern Indiana and southern Ohio. Families that had been historically Methodist and/or Catholic (my family) suddenly subscribed to the notion Christ would return, very very soon and with a vengeance. For me, it was like an alien invasion. Everyone morphed from humans to these three-eyed Born Again creepy things. People started using this Born Again language, performing Born Again rituals, viciously ostracizing non-Born Agains. I thought my identity (one that was beginning to take shape) would be absorbed by the Born Agains. I remember, as a kid, thinking this is the end of personal choice. I told my mom (who never subscribed to the Born Again crazy) about my concerns. I remember her laughing a little and then providing these words of encouragement: "Yes, we're surrounded by a lot of non-thinkers, Keith. It's horrible. Grow up and leave this hellhole." Or something like that. I'm not sure if this is why I write, but it's certainly why I set out, at a young age, to find an environment where I could thrive as an individual and make up my own rules. Now that I think of it, writing is my way of making up my own rules.

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

A:  Mmm... but there are so many things to change. lol. I would challenge the theater community to really be the social/cultural barometer of our nation. Literature, photography, dance, visual art and music, boldly and courageously give testament to the truth of our times. And I'm talking about the main-stream stuff. However, theater, particularly off-Broadway and the regionals, appear a little afraid to challenge their audiences with the ugly (and beautiful) truth of who and how we are. There are, of course, many exceptions, but I'd like to challenge American theater, on the whole, to be much more daring (and to please stop singling out "black plays" as these things to do during February). Every play, no matter who wrote it, is an universal story.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, Lynn Nottage, August Wilson, William Shakespeare, Oyamo, Suzan-Lori Parks, Caryl Churchill, Tennessee Williams, Carlyle Browne, Edward Albee, and my brothers Victor and Greg ( who are/were the world's best mimics).

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that holds no punches.

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

A:  Go see every play within a ten-mile radius. Absorb the physics of a production. Listen to how language unfolds from an actor. The study of playwriting never ends. There's always room to get better. Also, don't judge other writers. Content may be challenging, but craft is craft. You could find fault in anything (and someone could certainly find fault in your work as well). Last, but not least, establish a community of fellow theater artists. Read your own work, PRODUCE your own work. Nurture and nourish each other. Don't wait for anything. In the words of Judy Dench as the character Barb in the film Notes on a Scandal, "Do, do, do!"

I Interview Playwrights Part 335: Brian Quirk

Brian Quirk

Hometown: Midland, Michigan; and Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Current Town: New York City, Hells Kitchen.

Q:  Tell me about the play you're taking to PlayPenn

A:  The play is called Nerine.

On the cusp of her adolescence, a gifted teenage girl--Nerine—moves to a housing project in Los Angeles with her mentally unstable wannabe actress mother, and her over-protective Argentine “Oma.” Unable to go to school due to her family's fear, Nerine channels her energy into creating a garden from the dust. But when her mother becomes pregnant, Nerine’s hopes for the future begin to collapse.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  Working on a book for a musical with the choreographer/director Donald Byrd. I am working on a play Summerland that is about the Fox Sisters and the spiritualist movement. I also am working on a new two-character play Warren. The play takes place in Detroit and deals with a surprising end of life relationship. I have had tons of time to work as I am in Taos, New Mexico at The Wurlitzer Foundation. I won the Robert Chesley award for 2010 and it came with a 13 week residency!

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 a little kid I loved to play dress up. I would take my Granny’s gold elf boots, my mothers fake pearls, and wear my father’s football shoulder pads. My parents saw that I loved to play and pretend. They bought me this box of hats. They were all plastic and bright colors. There was a cowboy hat, a fireman’s hat, a top hat, etc. They also gave me a cardboard box full of old clothes. I would go up to the attic and puts on these various hats and costumes and make believe. I would make up characters and situations. Sometimes this would involve going to the library and researching a period, say Tudor England. My poor sister had to be many of the wives of Henry the 8th! Finally when I was ten, I saw my first play, a production of Dracula at the University of Arkansas. I was mesmerized, horrified, terrified, transported and so excited that I couldn’t sleep for months. It rocked and transformed my world. I love that the theater has that power. I thought this is what I want to do with my life. I was hooked on theater for life!

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

A:  It would be that theaters would have to pick their season blind at least one play. So then a new crop of writers would come up, as the season would be chosen for the best writing not writing attached with a name.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  The late John Stix who would come to rehearsal at 83 and say “What can we learn today?”
Athol Fugard who has been a kind of mentor to me.
Craig Lucas whose work is so beautiful and who is so generous.
Daphne Rubin Vega who did a reading of Nerine last summer and inspired me to make the play better. She is a true force of nature.
I would add Tennessee Williams and Lorca. They are unique, lyrical, and both write these amazing women’s roles.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Many kinds, I love a good story. I thought August:County Ossage was amazing! I like experimental work. I really enjoyed NYTW’s The Sound and the Fury. I thought it was just brilliant. I dig the classics, their language, scope and theatricality. I admired God’s Ear -what a production! Such precision, and the use of language! I thought Being Harold Pinter had these moments of incredible simplicity, beauty and theatricality. I am also really inspired by transformational acting and great roles especially women’s. I thought Cate Blanchett’s work in Streetcar Named Desire at BAM was mind blowing.

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

A:  Write, write, write, and see everything you can. Find the stories that speak to you and tell them in your own unique way. Follow your heart and keep doing what you need to do no matter what.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I have been out of town for ten weeks so I am a bit out of but…
Go see Black Watch it’s coming back to New York.
Check out the work of directors Troy Miller and Wayne Maugans.
I’ve worked with both and they are super talented!
Head to Jimmy’s No. 43 for an id theater “sit in” www.idtheater.org
Read Bryan Charles book There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From
Check out the work of artists Karla Wozniak , Karlawozniak.com and Lucy Kim, luckykim.com. I am always inspired by great visual art.
And come to PlayPenn this July and see my play Nerine
and the work of the other wonderful writers! www.playpenn.org

I Interview Playwrights Part 334: Israela Margalit

Israela Margalit

Hometown:  Born in Haifa, a port town in the north of Israel.

Current Town:  I’ve been a New Yorker for quite a few years.

Q:  Tell me about your upcoming show with Kef Productions.

A:  First Prize is a play about a female pianist in the cutthroat world of classical music, where passion, inspiration, and talent collide with intrigue, ruthlessness, and sexual harassment. She could just as well be a dancer, an actor, a lawyer: a young woman swimming upstream in the turbulent water of career making with all its pain and splendor. Four terrific actors play the larger-than-life characters that inhabit this world: the agents, the conductors, the entrepreneurs, the art patrons, the teachers, the aspiring performers. You don’t need to know anything about music to connect with it. I think lots of people will find a piece of themselves in the play, and hopefully will have a good laugh in the process.

Q:  Tell me about your life as a concert pianist. Has that informed your writing?

A:  There are similarities in timing, structure, building a climax, choosing your moment. Another similarity is the need for self-criticism and constant editing. There is a huge difference between the first time I’d play a new piece of music, and the time it’s ready to immortalize on a recording. You think it’s good, but is it really? Is it ever? You can say the same about a play. I cut a number of lines in rehearsal today, and that’s after some sixteen previous edits. Writing, like performance, is never quite as perfect as we want it to be. It’s a lifelong work in progress. When all the elements come together, it’s magical.

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

A:  Childhood stories are self-serving, aren’t they? When I was eight, I took part in a national writing competition. The winners, of which I was one, were hired as reporters for a year of a children’s magazine called “Our Land.” My first assignment was to cover the visit of the Israeli President to my hometown, Haifa. After my story was published, the editor told me I was not journalistic material, because “You’re a lot more into the atmosphere and the emotion of the event than the gathering of information.”

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

A:  It would be nice to write for twelve characters and still have the chance of being produced. Imagine if Shakespeare had to write his masterpieces for three and a half characters! The economy of the theater is daunting. On the other hand, creating more with less is a welcome creative challenge.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My heroes are not playwrights but plays. A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Skylight. Time Stands Still. These are perfect plays in their own style.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Evocative, character-driven, unresolved. Plays that continue to occupy my thoughts.

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

A:  Prepare to throw out your best lines if they don’t serve the character. And don’t show your first draft to anyone who can make or break your career. It’s normally not half as good as we think it is.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My play TRIO is having a sold out run in Los Angeles, following five years of sold out halls in Moscow and throughout Russia and Ukraine.

Moritz Interviews Me for Studio 42 Blog

Interview regarding our upcoming workshop production of My Base And Scurvy Heart.

I Interview Playwrights Part 333: Kia Corthron

Kia Corthron

Hometown: Cumberland, Maryland. A working class Appalachian town, walking distance to West Virginia.

Current Town: Harlem, Manhattan, New York City.


Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A big secret!

Q:  Tell me about your upcoming France trip.

A:  It's a colony called Dora Maar House, administered by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Dora Maar was an artist and photographer, and one of Picasso's lovers. Apparently he bought this house for her near a small village in the south of France. From the website it looks beautiful, and I know two people, a poet and a visual artist, who have been there and raved. They take two writers and one visual artist at a time. (There is also a piano so they must also sometimes take composers.) Your travel is paid for plus a generous meal stipend.

Colonies aren't for everyone, but I love 'em! Without the distractions of home, you feel like you have forty hours in a day, all for writing!

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

A:  It took me awhile to figure this out - I think because everything from my childhood explains who I am as a writer and a person.

The town I grew up in was at least 95% white. Very working class except all those factories that made it a booming place in the '40s were closing in the '60s and '70s, when I was growing up. My mother's cousin lost his job in the textile place after twenty years or more and was left with nothing - no pension, nada. (As an adult of course I know now all those places went internationally to hire sweatshop workers from among the desperately poor.) My father had a horrible job, but one of the very few remaining steady ones, at the paper mill. So one of his perks was to bring home pens and pencils and reams of plain white paper. And even staplers! (My mother was so delighted with the latter I remember her once stapling all over a piece of paper until she finally stapled her finger.) I made use of all those in my play - making up stories and turning them into little books.

Coming of age in such an atmosphere, there were wonderful things: running the neighborhood till we had to go in at dusk without our parents locking us up in the yard, fearing for our safety. There were also plenty of incidents of racism (and sexism). I'll name just one, though this is when I was a little older - high school. I guess I was in ninth grade. Gym class. There were about fifteen of us girls on the steps in our gym clothes, waiting for the others to get ready. I was the only black girl. One girl was standing. She said she had a joke to tell - but then she realized she couldn't tell it. Another girl begged her to tell it. She whispered it to her, and the second girl cracked up, but agreed, they couldn't tell that joke. The other girls begged for the joke. I didn't. I knew exactly what it was. And if I had any doubt that it was anything but a nigger joke, it was all clarified when the joke that could not be spoken aloud was whispered to every single girl sitting there except me. In a deliberate way, no one looked at me as the joke was passed around.

I'm not even sure why I shared that story, except that it has stuck with me all these years and that would seem significant. I would imagine it (and a thousand other youthful incidents) would speak to issues of race in many of my plays. And living in such an economically depressed area certainly influenced my writing about classism and workers' issues. Also, as someone who spent much of my young life as an outsider to a large degree, I can write about outsiders - frequently do - and am perfectly satisfied being alone. (I've gone to artist colonies where I am the only person there, and loved it! Sans socializing, even more time to write!)

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

A:  One! Okay. I wish there was more respect for the arts here, as in other countries, so that work could be exponentially more subsidized. This could allow for bigger cast plays. Not every play is a three-hander, and I think the pressure to write these small plays, that sort of self-censorship, has cost the American theater harshly in creativity. More subsidies could also provide for cheaper ticket prices, allowing for more diverse audiences and reducing the suicidal stigma of theater as art for the elite.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  This question always stresses me out cuz I know I'm going to forget somebody important! So here are just a few: Aristotle, Amiri Baraka, Augosto Boal, Bertolt Brecht, Hallie Flanagan, Adrienne Kennedy, David Rabe, Peter Sellars, Ellen Stewart, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Luis Valdez, Naomi Wallace.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like to be surprised. I like challenges to the status quo - which are surprising. I like courage on the part of the writer - which, in production, then requires courage on the part of everybody else.

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

A:  Never feel the need to take unsolicited advice; there are a lot of people out there who would love to rewrite your play for you. But do ask the opinions of those you trust, and (in the case of a post-show discussion, for example) listen to the thoughts of strangers as well. Be polite, but work hard to stay true to your own intentions. Which may mean discarding 95% of what you hear - but that usable 5% might prove to be invaluable.