Bob Clyman
Hometown: Bronx, NY
Current Town: North Caldwell, Nj
Q: Tell me about To She Who Waits.
A: It's about a mother-daughter relationship that may or may not have been damaged beyond repair. When the mother, Meg, left her husband, Jack, three years ago, she agreed to leave their 13-year-old daughter, Hannah, to stay with him briefly, while she found a job and a place for them to live. However, during those three years, Jack and their increasingly extreme religious community have kept her from seeing Hannah. Now that Jack has died, after making the church Hannah's legal guardian, Meg finally has a good lawyer, who is dedicated to fighting the church's encroachment on parental rights and convinces the judge to order 12 visits for Meg with Hannah. But to have any shot at getting custody, Meg will have to convince her now 16-year-old, openly hostile daughter, who adamantly believes that Meg abandoned her, to leave the only life she has known, her church family and the place they've been waiting, certain that God will come for them any day, in order to move to a secular world, where the only person she'll know is the mother who left her behind.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I've started writing a play about Doomsday Preppers. As with To She Who Waits and just about everything else I write, I get tremendous pleasure from taking on a subculture that baffles and troubles me, in the hope that I'll be able to understand its members better and write a play that even they would consider fair.
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 sort of an answer. Like a lot of kids who either become psychologists or playwrights (I became both), I found myself both deeply disturbed and endlessly fascinated by the impassioned conflicts that would suddenly arise among the people I knew growing up. When I hear people discussing a play, they often seem concerned with whether and how much the characters changed, clearly equating greater change with more successful drama. And I can see why they would think that. But coming from my own early awareness of conflict, I feel particularly interested in characters who do everything possible not to change, even when advantages of change are obvious, even to them.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: A living wage would be nice.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: I've always been drawn to British playwrights. While they obviously don't have a monopoly on this, so many of them seem undaunted by the challenge of dramatizing complex, layered subjects, whether philosophical or political, which they're able to handle with crisp, pointed economy while still managing to be funny as hell. Out of those writers, the few who are also highly theatrical and freakishly inventive, like Caryl Churchill, are the ones I usually go back to, when I need someone more inspiring than me to inspire me.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Plays in which I can't afford to stop paying attention for even a second, because every word counts. The kind of dramatic questions that fascinate me are usually ethical in nature and essentially unanswerable. For instance, what is it about good intentions that the road to hell always seems to be paved with them? If we need to make a decision, and the consequences of making the wrong one could be disastrous, how can we know we're making the right one, when we never have either enough information or time in which to make it. And if we're doomed to always be making our most important under these impossible conditions, how are we supposed to take comfort that we at least made them with a good heart and the best intentions once we've recognized our nearly boundless capacity for self-deception?
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: It's very hard to get large cast plays produced these days. If you need to write a large cast play, because that's the only form your dramatic vision can satisfyingly take, then by all means, write large cast plays. But remind yourself from time to time that there are genuine pleasures in the art of compression and make every extra character you add to your new plays defend his or her right to exist.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: To She Who Waits will be performed at Shetler Studios, Theatre 54 at 244 West 54th Street, 12th floor. It will run from Thursday, May 23 through Saturday, June 8. To buy tickets, go to www.brownpapertickets.com or call 800-838-3006.
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