I Interview Playwrights Part 362: Tom Jacobson

Tom Jacobson

Hometown: Oklahoma City

Current Town: Los Angeles

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Just finished a poltergeist incest musical and will next tackle the second play in The Vesuvius Trilogy. I finished the first in February--it's about a Roman family that puts on a fake Greek play in their private theatre on August 24, 79 AD. The second is Clytemnestra, the fake play they put on. And the third will be about the American archeologists who find the family 2000 years later.

Q:  How many plays have you written?

A:  50 full lengths.

Q:  What is your process like?

A:  10 page outline, many drafts, review by a playwrights group and smart director friends.

Q:  Do you work on more than one play at a time?

A:  I can be researching one play while writing dialogue for another, but I couldn't be at the same stage of two plays simultaneously.

Q:  How would you characterize the LA theater scene?

A:  Very vibrant, best kept secret. More plays than anywhere, thanks to the largest acting pool in the world and the 99 Seat Theatre Plan that allows the best Equity actors to appear in tiny venues for almost no money (with the notion that they'll get attention that leads to paid work in TV and film, which actually works sometimes).

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 high school we spent three months deceiving our classmates with fake devil worship at an abandoned farm outside of town: stage blood, giant candles, pentagrams, machetes, burned bones, notes signed in blood, cow skulls, creepy blue lights, black hoods, stolen cars, etc. We finally had to quit when other kids in our school scared themselves so badly they drove away without looking and had a bad wreck. No one was hurt (they were just drunk) but when we arrived to check out our handiwork we saw ambulances and police cars. The driver of one of those cars only found out it was fake last summer at our 30-year high school reunion.

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

A:  Create a strong link between regional and Off Broadway theatres and the 99 Seat Theatres of Los Angeles. The intimate theatres here could be a fantastic spawning grown for plays that could quickly move to larger venues across the country. It's inexpensive to put on a play in a small theatre here, but the quality is extremely high (most of the time). If plays could be launched nationally or internationally here, that would be ideal. The audiences are smart, daring, and younger than in large regional theatres. The plays are being done here already. If only we could find the missing link.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Most of them are writers: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, Wilde, Miller, Churchill, Kushner.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Good, complicated storytelling that grabs me emotionally and makes me think. I like narrative and get impatient with unstructured images and characters that don't engage me. I like seeing something I've never seen before. I love to laugh and cry in the theatre--if I do either to the point of embarrassment, I'm a happy theatre-goer.

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

A:  Sleep with everyone. Or at least have lots of friendships with actors, directors, designers and other playwights. Actually, it's probably best not to sleep with them. But fall in love with them, definitely. Those are the people who will get your work on stage and make sure it's great. They will literally get you productions. And once you've found great collaborators, nurture those relationships--nothing will serve you and your plays better.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I've had terrific reviews for the following shows in Los Angeles in the last 10 years, but little luck getting productions elsewhere. Because they've already been done by wonderful actors working with terrific directors, they're pretty polished scripts. It would be fabulous if a regional theatre would pick one of them up!

Bunbury (3 women, 3 men; 1 set) When he discovers he is only a fictitious character in The Importance of Being Earnest, Bunbury joins forces with Rosaline, Romeo’s never-seen obsession from Romeo and Juliet. Together, they win back their loves and change the world by changing classic literature. Winner of a Ticketholder Award and Garland Award for Best New Play, Critic’s Choice in the Los Angeles Times.

The Friendly Hour (5 women) Based on the actual minutes of a women’s club formed in rural South Dakota in 1934, this poignant comedy charts 70 years of personal and national history, from skinning skunks and julebukking in the 30s to restoring native prairie in the new millennium. Soon to be a short film entitled Prairie Sonata.

House of the Rising Son (4 men) When Trent brings Felix home to New Orleans to meet his father and homophobic grandfather, the family’s demons come slithering into the light. Watchful ghosts, sinister hustlers, and a myriad of parasites lead Felix on a Southern Gothic journey to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. Critic's Choice in the Los Angeles Times.

The Orange Grove (4 women, 5 men) A small Lutheran choir in its death-throes provides the backdrop for this Chekhovian warning of the impending doom of mainline Protestantism in America . Laughter through tears with nice lemon bars. Critic’s Choice in the Los Angeles Times.

Ouroboros (2 women, 3 men) Two American couples get caught in a chronological palindrome on a trip to Italy . Stigmata, alchemy, adultery and St. Catherine of Siena ’s severed head plague a nun and a minister in this circular love story that is a comedy if performed forward and a tragedy if performed backward. Winner of Best New Play and Production of the Year LA Weekly Awards.

Sperm adapted from Jacques Miroir’s 18th-century play (2 women, 5 men) Pulled from the stomach of a whale, an American whaler is bleached blind and becomes a modern Tiresias in the court of Louis XVI. He seduces Marie Antoinette and sets the king on a path to destroy France and ultimately humankind. A tragicomedy in rhymed couplets. Critic’s Choice in the Los Angeles Times.

Tainted Blood (3 women, 5 men) Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle use logic and religion to fend off a seductive vampire in this fang-in-cheek comedy/thriller. Pick of the Week in the LA Weekly, and winner of seven Valley Theatre League Awards.

The Twentieth-Century Way (2 men) is the true story of two actors who hired themselves out to the Long Beach Police Department in 1914 to entrap "social vagrants" in public restrooms. Thirty-one men were arrested, and the ensuing scandal led to an ordinance against "oral sodomy" in California. Nominated for five Ovation Awards, a GLAAD Award and four LA Drama Critics Circle Awards, winner of Outstanding Production of a Play (New York International Fringe Festival), and a 2010 Agnes Moorehead Award (Top Ten Live Performances, Gay City News).

And then I have 25 plays not yet produced--world premieres available! The most recently written are:

The Rosy Fingers of Dawn (2 women, 3 men) Not even the eruption of Mount Vesuvius can stop an inventive and theatrical Roman family from putting on their production of a lost Greek classic, Menander's Clytemnestra. The show must go on!

The Journeys of Yuzu adapted from the ancient Pali manuscript (1 woman, 5 men) A young assassin seeks clues to his origin and discovers a secret that changes the world. Pure evil pursues impure good in this irreverent verse drama about the ultimate action hero.

Los York (3 men) UCLA or NYU? Seduction and betrayal or self-sacrificing love? Otis is stuck between two coasts and his two gay uncles, in the middle of an America living in terror. Choosing a grad school was never this hard.

The Lock of the Five Keys (2 men) An American professor pursuing a lost letter by E.M. Forster disappears in India, provoking a manhunt across three millennia in a play within a play within a play within a play within a play.

Tom's website

tomorrow

CLOWN BAR
by Adam Szymkowicz
directed by Kip Fagan

Lyrics by Adam Szymkowicz and Adam Overett
Music by Adam Overett

with Alex Anfanger, Brett Aresco, Stephen Bel Davies, Sam Breslin Wright, Jamie Effros, Jessy Hodges, Beth Hoyt, Jessica Pohly, Dominic Spillane, and Steve Stout

Long ago Happy left the Clown Bar and the organized clown crime world to work for the good guys.  Now his junkie brother Timmy has been murdered, and Happy returns to his old life to ask a few questions.  Can he go home again without getting sucked into the seedy clown underbelly of vice and violence?  And will he survive the gun toting clowns who used to be his friends? Or Blinky, the lady clown he left behind?

ONE NIGHT ONLY: Sunday, June 19 at 7 p.m.
Seventh Street Small Stage
at Jimmy’s No. 43
43 East 7th Street (between 2nd/3rd Aves)
6 to Astor Place, R/W to 8th Street, F to 2nd Avenue
Seating extremely limited – for reservations and information please call 212.946.5198

I Interview Playwrights Part 361: Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Hometown: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Current Town: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Q: Tell me about your play next season with the Huntington Theatre.

A: I have lived in Harvard Square for 46 years and been a playwright for 30 years so it was time to write a Cambridge comedy about friends on the cusp of old age. In Before I Leave You, Emily’s cozy world threatens to fall apart: her husband Koji suddenly embraces his Asian roots as his theater career takes off; her best friend Jeremy has a mysterious illness and stops work on his novel; her son leaves home to live with a grocery checkout girl; and her girlfriend Trish has her eyes on Koji. Longtime friendships morph and crumble in the blink of an eye.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: For the last year I have been researching and writing the first draft of Mammal Heat, my golem/robot play. The four characters are Golp, a humanoid with feelings (and with all of Google poured into his head); Maggie, the scientist who created him; Maggie’s 8-year-old daughter, Abigail, who plays with him; and Maggie’s embittered 59-year-old mother, who teaches him about the facts of life. Mammal Heat is a domestic robot play with a window, via TV, to the war raging on the other side of the world.

Q: Tell me about the Huntington Playwright Fellows Program.

A: I am very happy being a Huntington Fellow. Playwrights often feel like itinerant peddlers as they wander from theater to theater, displaying their wares. It’s extremely nice to have a professional roof over your head, especially one that invites its HPFs to all its performances (as well as opening night parties), and makes you eligible for a reading at the end of your tenure. There’s a forty-year age span in our small group and an exciting range of styles and subject matter. Our bi-weekly discussions, under the sharp and genial direction of Lisa Timmel and Charles Haugland, are lively, helpful, and fun. It’s surprising that I enjoy the TPFs so much, being the sort that usually works slowly over time (and also the sort that tends to overanalyze my critics), but I find “the rose, the thorn, the bud” approach to the TPF discussions very nurturing. Most of my writing life I’ve felt like a part-timer; now at 72 I’m finally working full-time.

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

A: As an Asian American woman playwright, I would like the audience to park its assumptions at the theater door. I realize that’s impossible - I admit I tend to be excited by and supersensitive to Asian American plays because it’s like seeing something done by my family. But as a playwright I tend to write what I feel like writing; I don’t let someone else dictate the terms. I believe if you write on what moves you, everything you are will go into your play. One more thing - I think my Asian American characters should be judged like any of my other characters, not just as representatives of a group, but on their own terms.

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

A: Keep a journal, write two hours a day, read hundreds of plays, go to a play a week, get to know your local playwrights and rush to see their plays, when you have writer’s block distract yourself with a 10-minute play and submit it to the innumerable festivals in your favorite cities all over the country, have close friends (other than yourself) that you study and know inside out. Never give up, never despair – after three decades of doing what you love most, the Huntington might give you a call.

I Interview Playwrights Part 360: Hannah Moscovitch

Hannah Moscovitch

Hometown:
Ottawa, Canada

Current Town:
Toronto, Canada

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m in Banff, working on a play commissioned by the Banff Centre called We are at War about the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. It’s based on interviews with three veterans who did tours in Panjwaii, one military psychiatrist who runs a PTSD clinic in Ottawa, and two journalists who were embedded with our troops.

Q:  How would you characterize Canadian theater?

A:  I spend most of my time in Toronto and theatre culture varies a lot across the country (we only have one tenth the population of the States but we’re so spread out that different aesthetics develop regionally). Okay but I’d say Canadian plays tend to explore ambiguity, complexity of human experience, and subtle shades of meaning. And our sense of humor is relatively self-deprecating and ironic. It comes from knowing we’re an icy outpost and not at the centre of things. And to be honest a lot of the plays that get done in Canada are made in England or the States. Canadian theatre culture is young. Almost all of the great Canadian playwrights are alive.

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’s common knowledge in my family that I’m terrified of spiders. It’s true that when I was a little girl I was terrified of spiders. Now I’m not scared of them but somehow it’s become so much a part of my identity within my family and it’s so expected of me that I’ll lose my shit when I see a spider that I pretend to be frightened of spiders. I scream and run out of the room over spiders even though I’m not at all afraid.

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

A:  The ticket prices.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My first heroes were the Canadians playwrights: Judith Thompson, John Mighton, Daniel MacIvor, George F. Walker, David French, Claudia Dey, Morwyn Brebner, Michael Healey, Adam Pettle, Wajdi Mouawad, Michel Tremblay, Michel Marc Bouchard, Robert LePage...

At the moment I’m reading a lot of Edward Bond. It’s blowing my mind.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I don’t have a kind, I don’t think. I’m pretty fervent about believing that you don’t have to suppress one theatrical style to promote another. I get excited about verbatim, experimental performance, language-based plays, story-based plays, image and spectacle based plays, musicals. I like whatever’s beautiful and intelligent. I like what’s good.

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

A:  Produce your own work, find colleagues you want to collaborate with over and over again, and develop relationships with theatre companies who will produce your plays. The best case scenario is to develop a primary relationship with one artistic director who will produce all your plays (and take risks with you). Either that or built your own theatre company and tour your own work.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  East of Berlin and The Russian Play are being produced by Signal Ensemble in Chicago in October.

Little One is being premiered by Theatre Crisis at Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto in August.

The Children’s Republic is being premiered by Tarragon Theatre (where I’m in residence) in Toronto in November.

upcoming and right now

1.  I have a play in 300 Vaginas at Blue Coyote.  It's a really good night.  Go if you can.  now playing.

2.  Then, after that, a Production of Clown Bar with Rising Phoenix Rep
Directed by Kip Fagan
Seventh Street Small Stage at Jimmy’s No. 43  NYC
June 19.  7pm  (Free performance, one night only see website for details)

3.  Then a reading of my really new play The Artist at the Chance in CA in the OC July 20.  (I'm the resident playwright at the Chance Theater this year.  Did I tell you that?)

4.  A production of Nerve in LA in July.  (production # 11 of that play) Everything I've heard so far about the planned production sounds exciting.  I'll let you know details when they can be revealed.

5.  In August, Elsewhere will be done at Theatre Conspiracy in Fort Meyers, FL.

6.  In October, I will have 3 productions of three different plays in two different cities.  Rehearsing those will be tricky.  I'll let you know more soon.

7.  And there are at least 7 other planned productions I know of in '11 and '12 so far.

I Interview Playwrights Part 359: Alessandro King

Alessandro King

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City

Q:  Tell me about the play you have coming up with Trustus.

A:  Swing ’39 is an imagined story about a group of girls from 1939 Harlem who win a competition to meet the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. The play is about the relationships that spring up between the Italian Harlem residents and the members of the Goodman organization, including one girl who becomes romantically involved with Benny himself.

I’d characterize the play as a character-driven ensemble piece, initially inspired by the works of Chekhov and Terence Rattigan, two greats I was reading a lot of when I wrote the first draft three years ago.

Swing ‘39 was originally done at Sarah Lawrence College, a production in which I actually played Benny. This August you can catch it at the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s part of the Trustus Playwrights Festival, one of the oldest play festivals in the country. I am extremely honored and excited about this wonderful opportunity.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’ve been developing my new play, Tabor, at INTAR, where I’m a member of The Pound, the new emerging artists lab there. I will most likely have a reading up some time this summer.

I’m rewriting a one-act of mine, North Island, that I hope to pair with another short piece with similar themes. And I am in the middle of research for my long-term major project, a play about Al Smith, my favorite New York figure.

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 used to collect Carl Barks comic books, and I started before I could even read. I used to cut them up and make collages out of them. I still have my big journal with each page devoted to a different character – Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Gladstone Gander. Each page is filled not just with pictures of the featured character, but images that represent what the character is “about.” So the Donald page, for example, also has pictures of bad stuff happening to Gladstone, his arch-nemesis.

I think this shows that even before I could comprehend narrative and plot, I had a very strong interest in character. I understood that personalities were being expressed and contrasted, and that each character had an ineffable yet specific essence.

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

A:  I think there are playwrights on this blog who are more eloquent when it comes to this question. But I will say that the affordability of ticket prices gets my vote for the top dilemma. If we could magically remedy that, I think many of the other problems would be helped.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I am who I am thanks to a crack team of teachers and professors: Bill Williams and Michael Gilbert of Trinity School, and Stuart Spencer, Amlin Gray and Christine Farrell of Sarah Lawrence College.

My favorite playwrights are Shakespeare, Chekhov, Terence Rattigan, Lanford Wilson and Kenneth Lonergan. They love their characters. Lonergan and Annie Baker are the two contemporary writers on my must-see list.

I read Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms a year ago and it is my new favorite play. It makes me smile just to think of it.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like to leave the theater thinking about the characters. If I leave thinking about the writer or the director – how capable they are, how smart they are – that’s good, but it’s better if I don’t realize they’re there at all. As a writer I try to be invisible.

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

A:  Well I am definitely just starting out myself, so I feel a little bashful about this one. But I will say this: I got the Trustus production by submitting to everything I was eligible for in the Dramatists Sourcebook. And I have a file cabinet with dozens of rejection letters. So, if at first…

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Swing ’39 goes into previews at Trustus on August 10th, with an opening night of August 12th:

http://www.trustus.org/show.php?show_id=6

Come down before the fifteenth and we’ll grab a drink!

My zany improv show, Listen, Kid!, currently plays at the Magnet Theater in New York:

http://magnettheater.com/viewshow.php?showid=36829

If you have children, you simply must take them to a Monster Literature show:

http://www.monsterliterature.com/

And if you’re planning on visiting the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer, you’d be crazy to miss the reading of Sarah Hammond’s beautiful House on Stilts on July 8th.

Thanks for checking out my interview! If you’d like to read one of my plays, shoot me an e-mail at AlessandroMKing at gmail dot com.

Summer classes at ESPA

studying with great people like Tanya Barfield, Sheri Wilner, Bekah Brunstetter, and Daniel Talbott.

Check it out!  www.primarystages.org/espa

I Interview Playwrights Part 358: Alex Lewin

Alex Lewin

Hometown: A couple of suburbs in Bergen County, NJ (my dad commuted across the George Washington Bridge), and then, after the age of 13, various locales in the 310 area code of Los Angeles. I was born in Suffern, NY. All of which means I don’t really think of myself as having a hometown.

Current Town: New York City.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A two-character, one-scene play called The Interview, about a 30-something, gay, aspiring filmmaker — sort of a member of today’s creative class — who is volunteering to be a “big brother” and is going through the screening process. As you might guess, I’ve been through this, and the extensive interview, which I knew was going to be personal and probing, surprised even me. They want to make sure any volunteer is a) psychologically stable, and b) not a child molester, and I was fascinated by the strategies they employ to gauge those things, and also by the interviewer’s agility in departing from the questionnaire when necessary. The play imagines an interview like the one I went through, but with an interviewer who happens to be having the worst day of her life, and an interviewee who happens to have some sexual proclivities that he can’t really hide (and doesn’t feel he should have to hide) from his interlocutor.

I’m also writing a screenplay called The Impostor, which is inspired by the Ghanian journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who is something of a chameleon/master of disguise. He goes “undercover” inside weapons smuggling rackets, or corrupt government agencies, and then exposes them in his newspaper — and nobody knows what he really looks like. In my story a journalist like Anas goes inside a high-class Washington, D.C., brothel, masquerading as a (female) prostitute. I jokingly pitch it as All the President’s Men meets Tootsie.

And I’m working with New York Theatre Workshop and Laura Flanders of GRITtv on a piece that will use the language of primary documents of the American Revolutionary period — writings of Madison and Jefferson, the Constitution and formal objections to it, populist agrarian pamphlets — and somehow (we’re in the very early stages) depict a debate or a rally or a polemic that is meant to take back a lot of this language from the lunatic right. (A phrase, by the way, that is becoming more and more a redundancy.) When they reference Jefferson and Republicanism, and when they purport to be “preserving” the Constitution, they’re almost always willfully misinterpreting American history and the thinking of the (so-called) founding fathers. Ask me in a month or two and I’ll be able to tell you more specifically what this piece is going to look like.

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

A:  This is your hardest question, Adam. The difficulty for me is that I was generally a cranky, frustrated child. I was an unhappy child who had a happy childhood. And I think that’s probably the answer to this question: I hated being treated like a child, I hated being a child, I couldn’t wait to grow up. (It’s why the Peter Pan mythology has always bored me to tears. Why would anyone want to be a child forever?) I never read children’s books, I read mysteries and spy novels, even though I didn’t always understand what I was reading. I hated the Narnia stuff. When the Nursery Rhymes category comes up on “Jeopardy!” I just throw my hands up in surrender.

I’ll tell you a story the significance of which I can’t possibly name, but for some reason it feels like a right answer to your question. When I was eight years old I went to a sleepaway camp, Camp Watonka, and I remember walking across a big lawn at twilight and stopping to stare at a boy, a year or two older than me, who was wearing a teal t-shirt and blue jeans. The sleeve of his shirt stopped just above his elbow, revealing a hint of upper arm, and the hem of the shirt stopped just barely below his crotch. All I knew was that something I really wanted was being simultaneously called attention to and withheld from me. He snapped me out of my reverie by demanding, “Got a prob?” I hurried on to wherever I was going. To this day a t-shirt and jeans is, to me, the sexiest outfit a man can wear.

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

A:  I would love to see theatres guarantee production to their commissionees. I would love it if theatres said, “Here’s a commission. Whatever you write, we’re gonna do it.” With certain understandings and qualifications of course: if, for instance, the playwright writes a 17-character play, s/he’s got to understand that the theatre won’t be splurging, then, for some elaborate set. Or the converse: If the playwright needs to have a functioning volcano and a waterfall, they’ve got to keep the cast small. Et cetera.

If plays were generated in such a fashion — as Angels in America was — I believe they would be more audacious. Bigger in every sense. One of the great qualities about the graduate theatre program at UC San Diego, where I got my MFA, is that each writer basically has an open-ended commission. For three seasons. You write a play (a one-act in your first year, full-lengths in years two and three) and somehow, some way, the department finds a way to produce what you write, even on shoestring budgets, during the Baldwin New Play Festival every April. They make it happen. Everyone gets together and finds a way. It’s what gave me the courage to write a three-act, ten-actor play about God and geopolitics and archaeology and the Koran and sex and ghosts, a play unlike anything I’d built before. And then that was the play, The Near East, that got me a lot of attention when I came out of grad school.

If theatres worked that way, how might American playwriting be different? I believe we’d see more political plays, more boundary-busting plays. And, yes, of course, a lot of them would be bad, but they’d be audaciously bad. I think we’d see American plays move away from modest, intermission-less, four-character dramadies with literate, minimalist dialogue. I’d rather see an ambitious travesty than a timid mediocrity. I’m not kidding when I ask: When’s the last time you saw a play with a volcano or a waterfall?

The obvious objection is, “Whoa, wait a second, how could a theatre possibly commit to producing a play that doesn’t even exist? Isn’t that taking too big a chance?” To which I respond: Theatres that do new work, I expect, would like this idea because most of them don’t really program plays, anyway — they program writers. (Which may actually be the real problem.)

Also, I wish the New York Times would publish more than one critic’s review of a given play, as the British papers do, and as the Times sometimes does with books.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Eugene O’Neill, the greatest of American playwrights. Caryl Churchill, the greatest playwright alive. Amy Freed. Larry Kramer. Jon Robin Baitz for writing The Paris Letter. My first theatre teacher, Ted Walch, who, when I was fifteen, put a copy of Glengarry Glen Ross in my hands and changed my life. Suzan-Lori Parks, all of whose plays, good or bad, are audacious. And he may be an unusual suspect, but the late, great film critic Robin Wood wrote about art as a form of protest — an antidote to all the bullshit — in a way that makes me proud to be an artist.

Q:  What kind of theatre excites you?

A:  Theatre that responds to film. (Consciously, I mean.)

It seems obvious to say I’m excited by theatre that provokes debate, but I also love theatre that depicts debate, and I feel like I don’t see that very often. (David Hare’s A Map of the World is one of my favorite plays.)

I’m excited by “well made,” three-act, naturalistic drama. Very old-fashioned of me, I know, but I believe most theatre audiences and producers are secretly excited by that type of theatre, too. (And not because such plays are safe or conservative or non-threatening. Just the opposite. In our era of theatre, such plays are audacious.)

Also, I love a good dick joke. Not kidding. Theatre should aspire to be lowbrow and highbrow all at the same time. Shakespeare wasn’t above a fart reference or a pussy pun. A lot of plays I see strike me as really, really polite. I can’t resist quoting Anthony Lane’s review of The Bridges of Madison County: “If you added the word ‘Cheerios’ or ‘horny,’ for instance, the whole thing would faint with shock.”

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

A:  Don’t mistake intellectualism for intelligence. (Your own and others’.) Don’t worry about being smart, don’t try to be Tony Kushner. Keep figuring out who you are and keep expressing it as best you can. Talent is directly proportional to self-awareness. Also: the people you know to be phony will ultimately end up unhappy, so try not to obsess on them.

I’ll also pass along one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received: “Don’t do business with anybody you would not invite into your home.”

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  If you find yourself in the Evansville, Indiana, area on June 4, come see a reading of my play Alexandria at the New Harmony Project, where I’ll be workshopping the play for two weeks.

Also, I co-author, with Aaron Rich, the blog They’ll Love It In Pomona, where Aaron and I review movies and make fun of one another along the way.