I Interview Playwrights Part 475: Megan Hart

Megan Hart

Hometown: Highland Park, NJ

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  Tell me about This Is Fiction. Is it fiction?

A:  This is Fiction is my first play, aside from a couple of 10 minute plays and a one act. So I feel a little funny answering your interview questions since I haven't yet fully grown into the title of playwright. Then again, does that ever happen?? Anyway, its a play I started writing quite a few years ago, mostly as a dare to myself to see if I could or would do it. I've written fiction for a long time, but had never tried to write a play and one particularly slow summer, I decided I would. About a hundred drafts later, nurtured by my amazingly supportive (and pushy) theater company, InViolet Rep, This is Fiction was produced (by InViolet) at the Cherry Lane Studio this past month. In the end, I hope it's a play about family, about the fictions we create about who we are and what our family is, and about what happens when your family and your art collide. As for the 'is it fiction' question, like any true narcissist, I'd say while some of the characters may resemble my relatives, really aren't they all just versions of me?

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a big crazy fiction piece that I've been developing as part of a group of wonderful playwrights and theater makers (and fiction writers): Bixby Elliot, Jennifer Bowen, and Paul Davis. I'm also working on a screenplay.

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 in first grade, my school made us all take a computer class, with those big square green-screened early PCs. The idea was to just start typing away and get comfortable with this new-fangled device. It wasn't a writing class--in fact I don't think anyone even read what we wrote. But after the first week, my teacher called my parents and said I spent the entire class contorted in my seat, brow furrowed, chin in hands, agonizing over where to begin, what to say, what story to tell, what words to use. It all felt so IMPORTANT. By the time I was ready to touch the keyboard, the class was over. I don't remember much from that age, but I clearly remember those classes. I'd say it explains my neuroses, the respect I have for putting down words on paper, and my general inability to sit still.

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

A:  There's a lot I would change about the business (Showcase contracts can be frustrating. Lets have fewer shows on broadway based on (bad) movies. Why can't artists afford to see other artists' work? Why don't our audiences look like the audiences in any midtown AMC on a Saturday night? More community based theater. More actors of all sizes. Cheaper rehearsal space.), But theater? I don't know. I think it's pretty great, especially because it's always changing whether we want it to or not.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theater that makes me think, "I could never have made that!" "God, I wish I wrote that." or "I want to be in that." Really good acting excites me. Theater which is smart, not just clever. Theater which is clearly made with joy, heart, and sweat.

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

A:  The advice I keep giving myself: Stop apologizing. Keep writing.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Check out my blog, www.mousebouche.blogspot.com! Check out my theater company, www.invioletrep.com! Check out my talented sister, www.rebeccahart.net! Check out this fantastic web series that features my amazing husband www.eastwillyb.com! Eat a sandwich at my cousins' cafe www.thecommonschelsea.com!

I Interview Playwrights Part 474: John Clancy

John Clancy

Hometown: St. Louis, MO

Current Town: New York City and Dingmans Ferry, PA. That’s not a misprint, folks. Dingmans Ferry. We lovingly refer to it as Dingbat Junction or Dingleberry Falls, feel free to do the same.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  The Apocalyptic Road Show, the LIT Fund and a new piece for Day of the Living Festival in Los Angeles, currently titled When You Join Us. The Road Show plays The Ice Factory at the New Ohio Theater July 25-28th. It’s a profane cabaret celebrating the end of the world, funded by Creative Scotland. We toured Scotland with it last October and now it’s coming to New York. The LIT Fund is a new funding scheme that came out of The League of Independent Theater. We’ve got about seventy independent theater companies and venues committed to donating a nickel per ticket sold this year into a fund that we’ll use to establish and endowment, create an Emergency Fund and provide unrestricted funding to participating members. When You Join Us I shouldn’t talk about much because I’m still writing it.

Q:  How did the NY International Fringe Festival come about?

A:  Elena always says it was youth and ignorance. You can blame a lot of things on youth and ignorance, I imagine.

Short version of the story:

We had a big hit in 1995, Americana Absurdum by Brian Parks. One of the Present Company members, Leslie Farrell, had been to Edinburgh and said we would kill over there. We talked to a lot of people and they all said we should go. We ran the numbers and with a cast of ten it was going to cost us 30 grand. That was roughly our annual operating budget. So, that wasn’t going to happen, but I kept talking to people and one morning I’m sitting in our old offices in Hell’s Kitchen, drinking coffee and going through this notebook where I had all of these names and numbers and notes from New York artists who went to Edinburgh and it hit me. We’re all here. August is dead. (Remember when August was dead? Man.) So I picked up the phone, called Aaron Beall who ran Nada on Ludlow Street and asked him why there wasn’t a New York Fringe. He didn’t have a good answer, so our unholy alliance began. He knew a guy, Jonathan Harris, who was involved in launching the first American Fringe Festival in Seattle. The three of us met weekly for a while, basically playing chicken with each other, trying to find reasons why it wouldn’t work, but we couldn’t come up with anything compelling. Elena K. Holy, who was the Managing Director of Present Company back then, joined the conversation to give it some level of fiscal and administrative reality and then we were pretty much committed. And what really happened is that roughly one hundred amazing, selfless, inspired people materialized around us down on the Lower East Side in the blazing summer of 1997 and we all carried this impossible weight for twelve days. That summer is as close to the nonviolent anarchist revolution as I’ve ever experienced.

Q:  Tell me about the study guide you're creating for NYTE.

A:  So cool. Martin Denton, resident genius of the independent theater territory and I have teamed up to fight crime and…sorry. It’s just that we have these costumes Rochelle sewed up for us, so we keep thinking it would be cool if we went out and fought crime, but we’re older now and all of the good crime happens after midnight and seriously, if I’m up at midnight I’m too drunk to go out and fight crime.

What was the question?

Right.

I took ten plays from www.indietheaternow.com, one each from 1997-2006 and put them in a historical and generally larger context, wrote an intro to each one, asked the writers to write anything they wanted about the plays and then tried to tie it all together. Martin and I have been talking about this for a while, the fact that the history of this extraordinarily creative period in New York City theater isn’t being documented by us, the people creating it. So, we’re trying to change that.

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 a good one. I was telling this to some friends I was staying with a couple of nights ago, known them for years, Amy Shore and Sanjay Shirke, Heroes of the Fringe, and I’d never told them this.

When I was in kindergarten, I contacted Guillain-Barre, a very rare neurological virus that basically mimics polio. Gradual paralysis, starting with the extremities and then working in towards the trunk. If you were alone in the woods, you’d die because it gets to your lungs and your heart muscles. If it’s diagnosed, then you just ride the bell curve, it gets worse and worse, they put you on a respirator when it’s at its very worst, then you start getting better and recover fully. My memory is that the whole thing lasted about three to four months, might have been longer.

But here’s the cool thing:

I had just started kindergarten when it hit. So I went from being a kid, meaning being wild and unschooled and essentially a savage, into this very strange and regimented environment. It was only kindergarten, but if you think back you can probably remember the difference between nursery school and kindergarten. Nursery school was barely controlled chaos. People would regularly cry and shit their pants and try to stab each other with scissors and the teachers kind of dealt with it all from above. There were no real rules, no more than the ones you were used to at home.
But kindergarten was serious. It was the beginning of socialization. You had to sit at a desk in a straight row and you had to keep sitting there until you were given permission to leave. The circles of nursery school were gone, everyone sitting on the floor in a circle, the pillows of naptime, all of that was put away and everything was straight lines and discipline. And I remember sitting there thinking how strange it was and at that moment a friend of mine, Tommy, broke. He couldn’t handle it. We were all kind of trembling on the edge, but Tommy was the first to break. Bawling, screaming, on the floor, both arms wrapped around the base of the desk, inconsolable. And we were all fighting it, because that kind of thing is highly contagious. We all just wanted to run out of the room and back to the playground, back to nursery school, back home, back to our backyards, away from this weird, serious, quiet room of straight lines and discipline. And the teacher, instead of being understanding and human, had a job to do. So she was trying to be firm and reasonable, you know, “Now, Tommy, get up and sit back down. Come on, Tommy. It’s all right, just sit back in your chair.” Nothing worked, Tommy’s Mom finally came and picked him up, I think. And the rest of us sat there, kind of stunned, but obedient.

And then I’m gone for three or four months. I’m in the hospital, I can’t move, I’m back home, still can’t move, just lying in bed. For some time there I couldn’t even read, couldn’t hold the book and I loved to read. So I’m just sitting there, eighteen hours a day or so, awake and thinking. And when I go back to the classroom after all of this and I’m weak but I can stand and walk, everyone is really nice to me because I was so sick. And class starts. And all of my friends, everyone I knew, started raising their hands and talking in a weird way to the teacher, just a strange, kind of formal, false tone and everyone was quiet while the teacher talked and no one was fidgeting or looking out the window and it blew my tiny little eight year old mind. They had all been broken. They had all been trained and socialized. And I was a smart kid, so I picked it right up and began to mimic the behavior, but it was just an imitation. I knew I had to camouflage my basic little kid craziness and savagery or I wouldn’t succeed in this weird obedient world. But it was just camouflage. And so, in a way, I never really got broken. Which explains a lot, I think. It’s why I got kicked out of high school and grad school, why I could never really work for anyone else for any length of time. On a base level, I accept society but I was never infected by it as a kid.

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

A:  Oh, man. I only get one?

I’d wave the wand and it would no longer be Serious and Important and it would be fun and dangerous and sexy. It would be like punk rock or early hip-hop. We’d stop trying to write masterpieces and start writing love letters to each other and ransom notes to our enemies. It would be a lot faster and a little louder. It would be totally cool if your show didn’t actually, in the end, make sense. And every theater would either be a bar or at least have one attached to it

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  The regular rogue’s gallery: Artaud, Brecht, Peter Brook, Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Joseph Chaiken, lots of old and dead men and women. Also Norman Thomas Marshall and Curtiss I’ Cook, Kurt Rhoads and Nance Williamson. Norman has been around forever, he was the lead in The Gorilla Queen, one of the funniest people alive. Curtiss is the first actor I hired in New York, twenty-odd (very odd) years ago. He raised three kids, mostly alone, on an actor’s salary in New York. Kurt and Nance I’ve known since the late 80s and they’re working actors, mostly regional gigs, but they’ve snuck on Broadway once in a while. It’s those working artists that impress me most.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Exciting theater. Not to be a dick, but I’ve been telling my students lately that there are only two kinds of theater: interesting theater and boring theater. There is no meaningful difference between Broadway theater and regional theater and community theater and university theater. There’s interesting theater and boring theater. And interesting theater is interested in me. Me sitting there with other people watching and listening to it. Interesting theater understands that my time is the most precious thing I have and the world is very, very interesting already, so it tries to be more interesting than the street outside.

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

A:  Just write it down.

I used to have that posted above my writing desk at the old Theatorium. Nothing else. Just that, so when I looked up from the page (I used to write exclusively with a pencil in a yellow legal pad) that’s the only thing I saw.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Apocalyptic Road Show, www.sohothinktank.org, July 25-28.

Join LIT, www.litny.org

Join the LIT Fund.

I Interview Playwrights Part 473: David Zellnik

David Zellnik

Hometown:  Cherry Hill, NJ

Current Town:  Hell’s Kitchen, NYC

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I am finishing the first draft of a new musical (music by my brother Joe) about a New York socialite dressmaker with a drinking problem in China in the 30s on a mission. I am vaguely superstitious about saying too much plot-wise, so I’ll just say: like our last musical YANK!, the new show follows very closely one person’s epic journey over the most important part of her life. Also I’m working on a play commissioned by Blue Coyote Theatre Company that involves a guy who may or may not be a thief, staying with a woman who may or may not be a witch. Also it involves the semi autonomous Russian ethnic enclave of Udmurtia.

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 sometimes think the writer I am is based on the actor I was. Just high school stuff through college, though I majored in Acting at NYU. What it gave me is (I hope) a healthy dread of ever giving an actor something stupid to say, something that’s complicated in the wrong way. It makes me want to make sure they have lines that feel delicious in their mouths. Other stuff from my childhood? As a 12-year-old I fell in love with the musical CATS. I’m not proud.

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

A:  I love the collaborative nature of theatre, but sometimes it seems many artists and producers approach a new script as a series of problems to be fixed, rather than a text to be explored. No new play can survive too much of this (nor, might I suggest, could many classics). The problem isn’t bad suggestions, it’s good ones. Take too many good suggestions and the play eventually sucks. I don’t know why exactly this is so, but seems to be. More glibly, those sippy cups of alcoholic drinks at Broadway theatres are so damn annoying, when did they become universal? At Evita, some drunk guy behind me shook his icy Makers Mark the entire show. What happened to the social contract of theatre?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  My heroes are people doing necessary and exhausting work out in the world...and the theatre artists who bring the wide broken world back into the theatre, people like Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Athol Fugard, Lisa Kron; also those writers just drunk on words, who are rigorous with their craft like Sondheim, Stoppard, Pinter, Shakespeare; also those who sometimes sound goofy but are deeply soulful, like Oscar Hammerstein or William Finn.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  When the lights go down, every time – every time! – I still get so hopeful. Here is a room where anything could happen. So I guess: I get excited when something unexpected, real, or brave happens.

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

A:  The thing you think will be a hit? Don’t write that, it probably won’t be and if you want to write a hit, try writing TV or screenplays. On the other hand, the thing that makes you feel like “can I get away with writing this? Really?”... write that. I wanna see it. And don’t talk down to your characters.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Buy the YANK! original cast album… when it finally comes out.

I Interview Playwrights Part 472: Lonnie Carter

Lonnie Carter

Hometown: Chicago

Current Town: Falls Village, Connecticut

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Lots of new projects including a Tiger Woods play I wrote with a longtime friend, Mac Davis. If you Google Walter A. Davis, you'll see the kind of cat I hang around with for the last 50 years. It's called TRIM and features Howard Stern, Robin Quivers, Jack Nicklaus, Wendi Deng Murdoch, her hubby Rupie, Oprah, Joel Osteen, Elin Nordegren, Earl Woods to name a few luminaries. Did a staged reading last October at New Dramatists and we believe, as Mac puts it, that we've got lightning in a bottle. It's a What-If play, what if Tiger never went back to golf after Elin konked him with a 9 iron. Each of these folks has his/her reason for manipulating Tiger and he, becoming more and more Hamlettian, will have no part in it. O, did I mention that Marilyn Chambers plays a pivotal role? We've sent it everywhere. Anyone want to read it? Happy to send an ecopy.

But also, everywhere I turn, my play THE ROMANCE OF MAGNO RUBIO reappears. The original production by the Ma-Yi Theater Company directed by Loy Arcenas won eight (8) Obies in 2003 and has been done a lot across the country and abroad at festivals - Manila, Romania and soon Singapore. MAGNO THE MOVIE will soon be in production with me sharing screenwriting credit.

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

A:  Not a story, but an abiding memory. I recall collecting Jackie Robinson comic books. He was/is my hero. I wanted to be just like him.

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

A:  Fewer plays about dysfunctional families/neighbors shouting at each other. I'm reminded of that routine - Is it Monty Python, or does it go back to Peter Sellers and the Goon Show? Someone asks the man in the street what he thinks of all the violence and rape and incest in the media these days and he says, It's just awful. I get quite enough of that at home.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Graham Greene whom we don't usually think of as a playwright, but his play THE POTTING SHED is terrific. And he's such a terrific writer across the board. Shirley Hazzard wrote a memoir GREEN ON CAPRI. And is she a writer as well! Jean Genet. I saw a production of THE MAIDS played by three men, which is the way Genet wanted it done. Produced by New Stage in Pittsfield Massachusetts. Unbelievably great and directed by my friend Tom Gruenewald. (I had to remind myself that I wasn't in the best theaters in Chicago, New York or London.) James Joyce and his play EXILES. Lorraine Hansberry and A RAISIN IN THE SUN. How about someone living? My Yale pals, David Epstein, Bob Auletta, Bob Montgomery. My Chicago budds, Doug Post, Charles Smith, Steve Carter, Gloria Bond Clunie and the Victory Gardens Ensemble and every New Dramatist and Playwrights' Center writer ever.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Refer to the above. More specifically, theater which I don't leave saying - I AREADY KNEW THAT!

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

A:  Go be a Mad Man/Woman.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  The Falls Village Marshmallow Company whose motto is NO ART, JUST FLUFF!  Betsy Howie, owner, operator, CEO, CFO, Chief Cook and Marshmallow Tray Washer.

Self-plugs? My column FIST BUMP, an etymologically-centric rant/riff/rap I'm getting around. THE ODYSSEY CYCLE, a jazz album by Russell Kaplan, about to come out on the theme of Homer's The Odyssey. I have a spoken word TIRESIAS ADVISES CASSIUS CLAY/MOHAMMED ALI over one of the numbers. Nitroglycerine.
 
lonniecarter.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 471: Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman

Hometown: New York City

Current Town: New York City

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  A new play about sexual harassment and race.

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

A:  Like many of my generation I was handed The Diary of Anne Frank at an early age and it taught me that girls could be writers.

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

A:  Right now the standard is to reflect back to producers and their identified audiences, their perceptions of themselves. I would change this so that the standard for theater would be to expand what we understand about being alive.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I must admit that Cherry Jones has inspired and frustrated me for many years.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Work that grapples with something that matters while expanding the kinds of experiences, points of view and characters seen on the American stage.

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

A:  Don't do it.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Most recent book: The Gentrification of the Mind:Witness to a Lost Imagination (U of California Press)

I Interview Playwrights Part 470: Micheline Auger

Micheline Auger

Hometown: Sacramento, CA.

Current Town: NYC

Q:  Tell me about American River:

A:  I wanted to write the Great American Love Story. It's also a grieving. And a comedy. It's a grievedy.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  Right now I'm curating the Write Out Front Playwright Installation happening in the storefront of the Drama Book Shop August 13th - Sept. 4th. Some 70 playwrights will write new work in the storefront while the screen view of their computer will be projected on the wall behind them, visible to the street. People can engage, support and follow the playwrights via twitter, FB and the Write Out Front Website. They can go to their shows, follow their careers and when they win a Tony, Lily or Academy Award they can say I knew them when... Tina Howe called it "Inspired insanity!"

Q:  Tell me about Theaterspeak.

A:  I started Theaterspeak because I come from a small town and even though my family went to the theater and my dad and grandfather were writers, I didn't really view myself as a creative person even though I played the piano, danced and acted. Being a creative person or being in the theater wasn't really viewed as an option. In a way, I think it was viewed as being egotistical. Instead the M.O. was "most people are lucky not to hate their jobs and do what they love to do on the side" so get a job in human resources or something. I had also been told that it takes ten years to make it, so when I was acting or beginning writing, I didn't really put myself out there as much. So Theaterspeak is my attempt to reach out to artists who have beliefs that don't serve them and connect them with artists who are creating their own work, their own lives in inspiring ways. It's a way to build community, to encourage people to do what they want no matter what, to believe in themselves and to spark innovation and new creation. And it's also a big thank you to all the people (like you, Adam) who have shared information, resources and their talent.

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

A:  Um, well I talked to myself when I was a child. It was the way I reasoned things out so, in a way, I think that was the beginning of playwriting and finding creative modes to help navigate the world. I'd also stay in the car when my mom would go grocery shopping, and I'd find pieces of paper or loose change in the back seat and make them into characters and do little scenes between them. Then, in high school, my step-brother died, and I wrote a piece about it and performed it for my acting class. I didn't think I was a writer, I didn't think it was a solo show. It was just the human instinct of story telling with people in your community to create connection.

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

A:  I'm certainly not the first person to say this but I'd make it more affordable to produce and more affordable to see. I'd also increase the avenues from which we collect our playwrights and theater artists.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  All the theater artists and companies that I saw growing up in Sacramento and LA doing their work despite the challenges internally and externally.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I have pretty eclectic tastes in things but ultimately I'd say theater that is inclusive and is trying to have a conversation with a wide audience.

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

A:  Keep trying whenever you fail. Embrace others.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Come say hi to me and the Lesser American's who are producing my play American River at Theater for the New City July 12 - 22. You can get info and tix here: http://www.lesseramerica.com/box-office/

If you're a playwright who wants to participate in Write Out Front, you can get info and application here: http://theaterspeak.blogspot.com/p/write-out-front-playwright-happening.html.

I Interview Playwrights Part 469: Greg Pierce

Greg Pierce

Hometown: Shelburne, Vermont

Current Town: NYC

Q:  Tell me about Slowgirl.
 
A:  Hm...it's a two-hander: uncle and niece. What do I say? It takes place in Costa Rica, way out in the jungle. Snakes are mentioned. The niece is trying to escape from something really awful that's just happened. Her loner uncle is doing the best he can to help her out but he's got his own stuff...I always feel like I'm saying too much, Adam. Come see! It's at Lincoln Center's Claire Tow theater until July 15th. Anne Kauffman directed it and she's a wizard. Željko Ivanek and Sarah Steele are killer. Seriously—I'm not just saying that because it's my play. What else...I wrote Slowgirl a while ago, did a reading in my friend's living room, and then put it in a drawer for a long time, thinking it might live there forever. So I'm really happy that it's now living on the Upper West Side, in air-conditioning.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a three-part musical called The Landing with John Kander. We just did a lab production at the Vineyard Theatre, which Walter Bobbie directed masterfully. We're in discussion with the Vineyard about the next step. John and I are hoping to have a first draft of a new musical by the end of summer. I'm also working on a new play, and the libretto for an opera based on Thomas Mallon's novel Fellow Travelers (Gregory Spears is writing the music, Kevin Newbury is directing.) And I write fiction—mostly short stories, so that's ongoing.

Q:  How does your writing process differ when writing theater vs. fiction?

A:  The writing process is different for each project so there's no theater vs. fiction division in my head. Some things happen quickly, some don't. I tend to think about something for a long time, then write a quick first draft, then a slow and painful second draft, and then who knows? But it's always different.

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


A:  I wish it weren't so expensive to produce an Off-Broadway play. I wish all hard-working theater folks could make a living at it, and get insurance. I wish I could see a new Will Eno play every weekend. I wish jangly bracelets were illegal. I wish more people would go to new plays. I wish we could do away with all theater competitions, and just reward each other by showing up.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I'm listing writers only, though I have lots of non-writer theater heroes like the set designer Rachel Hauck. But writers only: Will Eno, Pinter, Tom Donaghy, Annie Baker, Irving Berlin, Chekhov, Slick Rick, Doug Wright, Conor McPherson, Strindberg, Kenneth Lonergan. Lots of folks, but that's who's on my mind right now.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Plays that have excited me this year: Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson's An Iliad, David Adjmi's 3C, Will Eno's The Realistic Joneses, Amy Herzog's Belleville. I don't know what these plays have in common, if anything, or why they excited me. They seemed like magic. Cheesy word, but how else do you say it? I left those plays thinking, "Wait, someone wrote that?" which is weird, seeing as I'm a writer. I like plays that remind me that the world is even bigger.

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

A:  Writing plays is a great thing to do because it's a great thing to do. It's easy to get all freaked out about where you fit in on some dumb spectrum but what's the point, you know? It's great to write something and do a reading in your common room with your friend, or to put up a show in your storage unit, or to just go to other people's plays for a while. Easier said than done, but it's good to be proud of where you are. Starting out is most excellent. If you've written 90 plays: also excellent. There's room for all of it. I'm not qualified to give advice but since I've been asked I'd say: just participate. In whatever way feels right to you. The only comfort in playwrights being wildly underappreciated in this day and age is that none of us is "making it" so we might as well just write what sounds good to us and support each other, right?

In late July in Los Angeles:

I Interview Playwrights Part 468: Susan Mosakowski

Susan Mosakowski

Home and Current Town: New York City

Q: Tell me about Escape.

A: Escape just opened in New York at La MaMa. Escape is about freedom—freedom from self-limitations, freedom from the limitations that come from the outside. It's about the chains that hold us back.

Emblematic of a person in chains was the great Harry Houdini. What kind of person was he? As a playwright, the most interesting thing about Houdini was that he was someone who understood the secrets of his jail. My play became about exploring our limits in all of their manifestations, physical and psychological. I created the character of Harry Houdini the III, but unlike his grandfather, Harry does not understand the secrets of his jail and is not a successful escape artist like the great one. We watch him roll around the floor in a straitjacket, trying to release himself as his wife Bess reads a newspaper and has tea—a normal day in the Houdini household—while next door, Gus, an unemployed elevator repairman, lies in wait with a shotgun. He keeps his neighbors and wife in the cross hairs, protecting his piece of the pie. At the same time, in an adjacent room, lives an agoraphobic actress held captive by Daddy, a terrorist on the run.

Three couples occupy three rooms. Imagining the play is to imagine a triptych. Three stages are going on simultaneously. The verbal text of the play takes place in one of three rooms and rotates from room to room throughout the play. The actors in the two adjacent rooms assume still tableaux or silent actions while the main action takes place. The two silent rooms create an expanded visual field for the play and are intended to contribute to the subtext for the play. The challenge in doing this was that the designers and the director had to create three stages and three spaces that are always present, always active because the characters never exit. The stage is transparent, where people live in rooms without visible walls or doors and windows, and yet they still are trapped. What does the key look like? That's my question.

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

A: If I could change one thing about the theater it would be to change the current system of producing theater in this country and in this city. There is a serious lack of small and mid-level producers. In the 80’s and 90’s there was a theater landscape that included a number of small producers doing off off Broadway shows, as well as independent theater companies doing their own work. Next on the ladder was the tier of producers for off Broadway, and then Broadway. There was an economic tier for many different kinds of work. It was possible to do daring and experimental work in smaller theatres and if the work could reach a wider audience there would be a step up to an off Broadway house. With the downturn in the economy what we have now is poor theater—and even that takes a small fortune to produce—and large theaters that need to have real ticket sales and subscription audiences to survive. Like the middle class that has vanished in this country so have the mid-range theaters. For many off Broadway theaters it’s imperative that they move a play to Broadway so that they have a cash cow to support their operations, their mid-sized ambitions need big money. While some large theatres offer a second stage and workshop productions, the vast majority of playwrights do not see their work produced on a main stage because the larger theaters cannot take risks, and the smaller theaters, in general, are producing less—NYSCA and the NEA has been gutted, foundation and corporate funding is down. Where’s the middle? How are we to sustain a vibrant theatre community when everybody is looking at the bottom line, when theater has been turned into a commodity? There needs to be greater support for those groups and individuals who desire to produce theater. Within reason, the dreams of a playwright or a director should not be tied to economics of a theatre.

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: I have many theatrical heroes. Early ones were Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Jerzy Grotowski, Suji Terayama, Richard Foreman, and Meredith Monk. More recent heroes are Ariane Mnouchkine, and Robert LaPage.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I’m excited by theatre that is total. Total in the sense that the conception of the work is a collaborative effort of text, music, choreography and direction, and design, all in process together from the beginning so that the whole stage is unified and that the theatrical experience is created from a wide artistic palette.

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

A: My advice to young playwrights starting out is that to keep the work front and center. It’s all about the work.

Q: Plugs pleas:

A: ESCAPE plays for one more week at La MaMa. Wednesday June 20 – Sunday June 24th.

Go to http://creationproduction.org/next/index.htm for info or to www.lamama.org

I Interview Playwright Part 467: Chiori Miyagawa

Chiori Miyagawa

Q:  Tell me about DREAM Act Union.

A:  It was a wild ride collectively writing the play, Dream Acts, performing it, and managing the production together. Also trying to collaborate with folks from the advocacy field, who in the end never understood what theater is or what theater artists do, was very challenging. (This is not always my experience collaborating with people outside the theater-I’ve had 3 years of successful collaboration with nuclear disarmament activists and educators. But I found out that the immigration arena is more complicated and territorial.)

There is complete information on dreamactunion.org : about the failed and still failing congressional bill DREAM Act that inspired us, our team, the advisory board members, the production, the panel we put together, press, photos, everything! Also, you can find where to make donations to help undocumented youth continue their education after high school. There may be another production in NYC coming up, which Saviana Stanescu, one of the playwrights is pursuing, and the play should be published online soon at IndieTheaterNow.com – please stay tuned!

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I’m putting politics and activism aside and going back to art and humanity in a larger picture and longer terms.

I’m working on a play titled This Lingering Life, which is very loosely based on 8 Japanese Noh plays from the fourteenth century. It has 27 characters and spans 10 years or 100 years, depending on the audience’s state of mind. It takes place in this life and Bardo (the place in between life and death), with Nirvana (the indescribable ultimate happiness) just out of reach.

Also working on a play, I came to look for you on Tuesday. that has 19 characters (one of them is Goddess of Light). It follows a woman from ages 6 to 50, tracing her non-existent memories of losing her mother to a tsunami when she was a baby to facing an approaching hurricane as an adult. The play takes place on this planet, but not in any particular geographical locations comparable to the world as we know 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 don’t have a story like George Washington’s cherry tree, which I seem to remember being told when I was a child. Also, my father used to repeat some proverb from some European country about how children should live in a house at a distance that does not cool the soup—meaning, a grown child (a female child) should cook soup and bring it over to her parents’ house from her own, and the soup should still be hot when the parents eat it. This story definitely made me put an ocean and a continent between my house and my parents’ house.

Aside from that, it became clear to me when I was about twelve that Japan and I were not a good match. I left when I was fifteen. I think it would have been okay if I was born there as an aristocrat in the sixteenth century or as an intellectual in the early twentieth century. Not as a woman--that would have been awful. I don’t particularly want to be a man, so I guess neither case would actually have worked.

I think I’m the writer and the person I am because I was born in the wrong country at the wrong time, and because I have a deep love-love-hate-hate relationship with my chosen country, the U.S. I appreciate my Japanese ancestry though, and I love love NYC.

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

A:  Government subsidy of individual artists. I’m writing to you, Adam, from a huge, nice flat in Berlin that belongs to a Spanish couple who are conceptual choreographers. While my husband and I spend a month in Berlin, our hosts are in their flat in Madrid, working in a performance festival. They don’t live extravagantly, but they are able to make a life for themselves doing theater. There is a certain self-respect and peace of mind that comes with the full-time commitment to one’s art (I only experienced it once when I had a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship—and I knew it would end in a year. I teach for a living, which I consider fortunate given the lack of government funding of artists in the U.S.) But of course, this is not about changing theater. It’s about changing our collective cultural belief and attitude toward artists and attitudes of artists themselves, so I think it’s a little beyond my dreams.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Eugene O’Neill. I can’t say his plays influenced me, but I admire him because he overcame the obstacles in the form of his parents (I know something about this), pulled himself up by the sailor’s boots (I don’t know if those boots even had straps on them) and rose from suicidal darkness to write. And he wrote his best plays at the end of his life, unlike many of his peers whose best work was done in their youth. I find all that hopeful. I wish my hero wasn’t a white male, but he couldn’t help being one. I must mention my major influence and inspiration, even though it’s not theater-- Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatrical theater. Theater that can happen only in a theatrical space. There is a lot of successful and impressive theater that can be done just as well or better on TV or film. I don’t see the point in that. I prefer theater that doesn’t have a sofa on stage, or at least a sofa that we are supposed to believe is a “real” sofa. I like plays that has very little language AND plays that have a lot of ideas seriously discussed with lengthy text.

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

A:  First, I would say don’t follow your heart, but instead look around and make a plan. Second, don’t get distracted by what’s popular or what seems important, but write your own unique plays, and make sure each play is THE play that could be your last. They seem like contradictory advice, but they aren’t. I did it completely differently—I followed my heart only and was blind to everything else and madly kept writing as an experiment. I made my life up as I went, always flying by the seat of my pants. I would take my own advice if I was starting over and not live Helter-Skelter style. Maybe. Oh, and start an IRA early!

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  2 books of my plays are published this year. If you’re curious, please purchase them. I don’t get a cent from it, but I’d love the books to be moving around out there. Thank you!

Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays
http://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Years-Waiting-Other-Seagull/dp/0857420208

America Dreaming and Other Plays
http://nopassport.org/Press

I Interview Playwrights Part 466: Daniel Akiyama

Daniel Akiyama
 
Hometown: Honolulu, Hawai‘i

Current Town: Honolulu, Hawai‘i

Q:  Tell me about A Cage of Fireflies.

A:  A CAGE OF FIREFLIES is about three sisters of the kibei generation -- sent as children to be raised in Okinawa, then returned to Hawai‘i as young women to live and work. The play is set in the year 2000, when the sisters are quite elderly, in a small Honolulu apartment where two of the sisters live and the third visits. A disagreement over a kimono collection forces them to confront the dreams and regrets they’ve carried with them since childhood, the long-hidden hopes and resentments that unite and divide them.

This is my first full-length play. I started writing it because I wanted to understand certain relationships and incidents from my own family’s history -- I suspect a lot of beginning writers do that. I slogged through a first draft in a playwriting class in 2006. Since then, it’s had so many revisions that it bears almost no resemblance to anything that happened in real life, and I’m fine with that.

A CAGE OF FIREFLIES will be developed in July 2012 at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab and will have its world premiere at Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu, in January 2013.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  Right now I’m trying to devote most of my time to A CAGE OF FIREFLIES, getting ready for Sundance and Kumu Kahua. I have an idea for a second play, but it’s in such an embryonic stage that I don’t feel like talking about 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 love this question, but I just can’t seem to think of a story with that eureka! moment. Instead, here is a family tradition that’s been part of my life for as long as I can recall.

Every Thanksgiving my family and I fly to the town of Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, where my grandmother lives. Thanksgiving morning after everyone arrives, we all pile into cars and drive to Saddle Road, a narrow strip of pavement that snakes through miles of uninhabited ‘ōhi‘a forests between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the largest mountains in the Hawaiian islands. We spend the day picking flowers and plants along the roadside -- ‘ōhi‘a lehua, false staghorn ferns, club moss, pūkiawe -- being careful to only take tiny cuttings from each plant, and only the plants near the path. Then we go back to my grandmother’s house and get ready for Thanksgiving dinner. The adults take the rest of the weekend to make wreaths out of the cuttings, which we bring back with us to Honolulu to give to friends and neighbors as early Christmas gifts.

I’m not sure why I wanted to share that with you. And I’m not sure what, if anything, it says about me as a person or a writer. Something about family, maybe? About continuity? About tradition?

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  A few names come to mind: Stephen Sondheim, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, August Wilson, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Lee Cataluna. Actually, I have a hard time answering this. “Hero” is a strange word, and the writers I really admire are those whose work -- the larger body of work as much as the individual pieces -- I find meaningful, whose career and style continue to fascinate me over time, whose attitude towards writing and the theatre resonates with me. There are a lot of writers whose plays I like or even love, whose careers have heroic episodes or a heroic trajectory, but whom I don’t consider my “heroes.”

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre in general excites me. I like plays that have a lot of clarity and thought, plays that are built on a solid foundation and assume their audience is smart and aware. I tune out when there’s a lot of shouting, or when I feel like I’m being talked down to.

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

A:  Well, I’m just starting out myself. As I said, A CAGE OF FIREFLIES is my first big play, and I still have a ways to go before I’m done, so I’m not in a position to offer advice. However, I can tell you what seems to be working for me so far.

Here’s one great thing: I found the right director. Phyllis S.K. Look has been helping me shape and re-shape the play for over a year. She directed the play’s first workshop and public reading in Honolulu in 2011, she’ll be directing the workshop at our 2012 Sundance residency, and she’s going to stage the world premiere in 2013. It’s exciting and stimulating to work with Phyllis, a director whose ideas are rich and vivid and incredibly detailed, but who is always committed to the integrity of the play itself. I know the production will be in good hands.

Q: Plugs, please:

A:  A CAGE OF FIREFLIES was a finalist for the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and will be workshopped at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, under the direction of Phyllis S.K. Look and the dramaturgy of Mame Hunt. It will have its world premiere at Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, on January 24, 2013, again directed by Phyllis S.K. Look.

I Interview Playwrights Part 465: Caitlin Saylor Stephens

Caitlin Saylor Stephens

Hometown: Baltimore/NYC

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’ve been doing rewrites for the second play in a trilogy called WHEN WE WENT ELECTRONIC. It’s about these two seemingly vapid American Apparel models named Brittney and Bethany who just had the shit beat outta them. The play is their multiple attempts to remember what happened the night before when they were attacked. Because they are so stupid, they mix things up quite a bit. So even though something very violent and tragic happened to them, their trial and error attempts to retrieve their memory are pretty funny. They also sing and dance which adds to the theatricality of the piece and lightens things up a little. I like that the scope of the play is funny and sexy and also incredibly heartbreaking. I think those ingredients made me want to write it. I also identify a great deal with the characters and what they are going through. When the stakes are high, not remembering something that happened is a terrible feeling. It changes your relationship with what is real and what isn’t. I always like to put my characters in a position where they are trying to solve an impossible puzzle based on a question I have in my own life. I know I’ve missed a step in the formula if it isn’t somewhat humiliating or answerless. Somehow, juicing the personal gives me the freedom to crank the style volume, create a distorted world, and look for some answers.

I also just spent time at Orchard Project beginning the third play in the trilogy. It’s called OUR FUTURE WILL HOLD. I’m still figuring out what it is, but I’ve known all along there’s gonna be a search party and a corpse-fucking scene! I’m pretty excited about it! I also want to include a live kitten in the piece. There aren’t enough live kittens in theatre and I’d really like to pioneer that trend. I know, I know, good luck finding a director for that one.

Q:  Why is everyone always hitting on you?

A:  My guess is booze. Either that or it’s because I don’t feel I have the right to deny a messy moment. I tend to luxuriate in the moments when things go horribly wrong. I call these moments “whoopsie” moments. My life is pretty much composed of one “whoopsie” moment after another. Like, “whoopsie” my boob just fell out of my shirt at an office meeting, or “whoopsie” where do I get my bagel and coffee in this strange neighborhood at 7:30 am on a Wednesday?, or “whoopsie” the guy I met at the wedding and had such a good time with was actually on leave from prison. WHOOPSIE. There. I’ve given away my secret of secrets.

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 raised by writers and artists so my world has always orbited around desire perpetuated conflict. I have this one very potent memory from my childhood that has definitely influenced how I resolve conflict in my plays.

My father had this gorgeous garden when I was a kid. Fresh everything. And every kind of blossoming anything you can imagine. Bleeding hearts. Dogwood. Snapdragons. The most stunning palate of color and hybrids your imagination can see.

My parents went through a very dramatic breakup when I was 10. I remember seeing my father destroying one of the flowerbeds with a shovel one day after a fight. Just weed-whacking the shit out of this beautiful rainbow. Because he was sad or angry or something. He might have just been shoveling aggressively, you know, really planting the shit outta those peonies. But how it looked to me was scary and extreme. I see things in extremes.

This moment creeps in when my characters are on the brink of resolution. And suddenly after something horrible happens they see flowers. Like in I LOVE DEAD THINGS after MOTHER is brutally ambushed and bleeding all over the floor, DAUGHTER sees cherry blossoms and she finally understands her conflict and resigns from her battle of always wanting to keep the love alive. Or in ELECTRONIC, when BRITTANY finally remembers what happened to her the night before, she gives a long speech about how she was murdered. As she describes the attack she is bombarded by “thousands of pollen-filled memories.”

I think seeing the apocalypse of flowerbeds gave most of my plays a heartbeat of beautiful sadness.

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

A:  Theatre needs more fucking. Seriously. It’s fun to watch and it’s fun to do. If fucking actually drove the theatre, people would be less concerned with the point of view crevasse and more propelled by desire. People would make choices based on what the world is craving and fantasizing about. Things would be less about gender, race, politics, and agenda and more about having a good ol’ time. Everything would be about the poetry and suffering that comes from desire. Unified. We’d be unified. Even if for just one night. An orgy of love-making, creativity, and support that ain’t got nothing to do with what boxes you check or don’t check on all of those mind-numbing applications. It would be about the art. The language. The rhythm. The physicality. The mysterious apartment and the foreign mattress. The role-playing. The did we really do that last night? Did we? The anything can happen, let’s fall in love, oh my god, oh my god! I love you. Yes. We all made this bed. And now we’re all gonna sleep in it. Together. More fucking in theatre. I’m starting a campaign. Join me.

I also think we have this tendency to forget that theater isn’t real. You are on a stage and therefore you are not experiencing something as it would happen in real life. There’s an audience! There’s a light that might fall on your head! There are sound cues and costume changes. Theater artists shouldn’t be trained anymore for real. They should be trained for presence, discovery, collaboration, and theatricality. They should be trained to be hybrids.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I love people who invert the expected and give the audience an emotionally immersive experience. My heroes are: Taylor Mac, Cindy Sherman, Lisa Kron, Kate Valk, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Mueller, and every one of my friends.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I am always exited by theater that has a personal artery that’s been struck by both style and character.

Stunning by David Adjmi, God’s Ear by Jenny Schwartz, Faust by Punchdrunk, Emperor Jones by The Wooster Group, The Amoralists, Young Jean Lee, Robert Schenkkan, The TEAM, Maly Theatre Company, John Kelly, anything Taylor Mac. These are to me, the pinnacle of theatrical excitement.

Also, theatre that really uses design and bridges the gap between the art world and the entertainment world is truly exciting to me. I love designers. They have a gigantic technical toolbox that gets my ticker ticking. They know how to use text to immerse and audience in a unique world. Costumes. Glitter. Fake eyelashes. Blood. Projections. Dancing. Music. Awesome lighting from unpredictable sources. Wigs. These things are always fun.

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

A:  If you want people to feel like they are a part of something, give them an experience. To give an experience, model your play on systems or processes that don’t involve arcs. Plays are much prettier when they look like constellations.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Voice and breath with Scott Miller.

La Colombe brews the most bangin’ coffee.

Lookout for BoomBoom my duo/collaboration with Lacy Warner.

Come to the July Amoralab with The Amoralists and see pages from WHEN WE WENT ELECTRONIC.
http://www.theamoralists.com/

Also, I’m single.

I Interview Playwrights Part 464: Greg Paul

Greg Paul

Hometown: Quincy, IL

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  It's a comedy called "Stand Up For Bastards". The jumping off point was Ralph and Montgomery from the movie "Fame" trying to make it after high school, but it has mutated into something else entirely. I'm having fun writing 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:  My father gave me his toy train set once. I quickly found that the fun part was making the train reach top speed then watching it careen off the track when it hit a curve. Before long, I figured how to unhook the transformer that powered the track, and I discovered that if you plugged it in and touched the bare ends of the wires together you would get these very gratifying sparks. And then, you could steal your sister's Barbie doll, pop its head off, turn off the lights and make sparks over her reclining plastic body. And when you did this you would say "Life! Life! Give my creation life!" But you would have to whisper it, otherwise your Mom might burst in to see if you were playing with yourself. Eventually, your sister would show up and get mad at what you did to Barbie.

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

A:  I guess I wish that more people would take a chance and get involved with it. To me, theatre has always been less about the entertainment and more about the experience of doing it. In any capacity. I'm addicted to the sense of belonging that theatre creates in those whose get involved. It changes people in ways that are both subtle and profound. It creates a temporary autonomous zone, where rules of space and time are broken, bent, reshaped. Where people try on new personas. Where technicians operate heroic intensity and purpose. I love it. I only wish everyone would have a chance to truly taste it.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  I have a fondness of Arthur Miller. I really love how he will take an issue and have the guts to say "This is wrong! Look at this!" all while telling a really absorbing story. I also have to say that Robert Wilson blew my mind during my college days. I did a paper on him and it really expanded my notions of theatrical possibility. Also Christopher Bayes! He is so freakin' funny! Making funny freaks of us all! More beauty! More funny!

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I like theatre that catches me by surprise. I feel like much of theatre right now is disappointingly consistent in it's socio-political content, so when I see something that violates the current conventions, that's always cool. I like theatre that has guts. I probably like that most of all. Whether it's funny or serious, courageous theatre is always something that I hope to see. And make.

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

A:  Write and write what you enjoy. But even when you don't enjoy it, keep writing. Tell your internal critic to shut up. Share your work when you are ready to (not before), and share it first with people you trust. Then get it out there!

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I have some things in submission currently and a project on the horizon, but nothing plug-worthy yet. Soon! Stay tuned!

I Interview Playwrights Part 463: Jacqueline E. Lawton

photo by Jason Hornick

Jacqueline E. Lawton

Hometown: Tennessee Colony, Texas

Current Town: Washington, D.C.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now, I’m finishing Bend and Sway, Don’t Break, which is about the domestic slave trade and fight for freedom in D.C. in the early 19th Century. I started writing it last Spring, but it got usurped by Love Brothers Serenade and The Hampton Years.

Bend and Sway, Don’t Break follows Dr. Jesse Torrey, a Philadelphian physician and philanthropist, who was on a crusade throughout the East Coast to advocate for the establishment of free libraries and public schools. When he arrived in D.C., he learned about the attempted suicide of a slave woman who was about to be sold South apart from her husband and children. She had jumped from the third story window of Miller’s Tavern, which was a notorious slave depot located on 13th and F Streets NW. She broke both arms and injured her back, but survived. Dr. Torrey visited her and discovered two kidnapped people of color, who were also about to be sold into slavery. Torrey went to Francis Scott Key, brilliant attorney and one-hit wonder, for help.

I’m reading the handwritten transcripts of this case and the newspaper articles that capture the response of congress members, who are being forced to confront the atrocity of slavery; it’s riveting! I’m grateful to have the next two weeks to work on it.

This summer, I’ll be working on rewrites on The Hampton Years, which will receive a world premiere at Theater J next season.

Q: Tell me about The Hampton Years.

A: Absolutely! The Hampton Years is set at Hampton Institute from 1939 to 1946. The play dramatizes key events in the life of art professor Viktor Lowenfeld and his students, John Biggers and Samella Lewis. Lowenfeld turned down a teaching position at Harvard to work at Hampton (a Negro school), which was absolutely unheard of at the time! John Biggers, who started off learning how to be a plumber, went on to become an internationally acclaimed painter, sculptor, and teacher. Samella Lewis, artist and printmaker, was a transfer from the University of Iowa. She had fiery and passionate temper, which led to a contentious, but truly respectful relationship with Lowenfeld. She’s in her 80s now and still works as an artist.

Recently, I met Hazel Biggers, widow of the late John Biggers, at the opening reception of African American Art: From Harlem Renaissance to Civil Rights Era and Beyond at the American Art Museum. She’s so excited about the play! Also, Samella Lewis read the play and had this say about it, “It’s good. Girl, it brought me back. I hadn’t expected that.” How exciting is that?!

Q: Can you talk about the Locally Grown Festival and working with Theater J?

A: Okay, so back in May of 2011, Shirley Serotsky, Theater J's Director of Literary and Public Programs, contacted me about submitting a proposal for their first ever “"Locally Grown: New Plays From Our Own Garden (or Community Supported Arts)" festival. The festival premiered Renee Calarco’s The Religion Thing; included readings of new plays by Gwydion Suilebhan, Stephen Spotswood, and myself; and featured workshop presentations of new works by solo performing artists Jon Spelman and Laura Zam.

I submitted The Hampton Years, which was originally conceived in November of 2010 after a conversation with Shirley about Theater J’s interest in exploring the Black and Jewish relationship. Since The Hampton Years, explores the relationship between Jewish scholars and Black students in the segregated south during the 1940s, it was perfect match for Theater J's mission and they commissioned it as part of the festival.

Working with Theater J has been and continues to be amazing! Their Locally Grown Festival supports the work of D.C. area playwrights in a nurturing environment and allowed us to contribute our voices to an already vibrant theater season. Having this level of investment and commitment at the early stages of the writing process was so invigorating! What’s more, the entire Theater J staff is so attentive, encouraging and passionate about the work we’re presented and their continued investment in us has been thrilling! I’m over the moon with joy and excitement about the upcoming production!

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 love this question! When I was in 3rd Grade, we were given an assignment to write a short story about Halloween. At this point, I was already writing adventure stories about my stuffed animals, so this assignment was a piece of cake! What’s more, I adored my 3rd Grade teacher, Mrs. Jordan, and had the biggest little girl crush on her two daughters, who were always very nice to me. (They both had gorgeous curly red hair, which reminded of Anne of Green Gables.) I wrote a haunted house story about all of them and Mrs. Jordan loved it! She loved it so much in fact that she asked me read it aloud in class. Horror upon horrors, I felt betrayed! I begged her not to make me do it. Despite the ME you know now, 3rd Grade Me was painfully shy and terrified to speak in public. Oh, I was so scared. I resisted with every fiber of my being, but ultimately ... I did as instructed. I read the story to my class. Every now and then, I would lift my eyes up from the page, which was gripped so tightly in my shaking and sweating hands, just to see if the class was looking and listening. They were, and they seemed to enjoy it! When I finished, they applauded so loudly! It was a room full of smiles and it felt amazing! Now, you can’t keep me from the stage; all thanks to Mrs. Jordan. That experience literally changed my life.

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

A: I want to rid this great work of ours of the incendiary bigotry, racism, sexism and elitism that runs rampant and silences so many beautiful, powerful and essential voices. I want more diversity on our stages not only in gender, ethnicity, and race, but also in content, style, and voice. I want theater producers, administrators, boards, artists, donors, patrons, and audiences to stop with all the nonsense, do better and be smarter! Plain and simple.

Q: How would you describe the DC theater scene?

A: Diverse, thriving, passionate, determined, brave, generous, eager, defiant, accomplished, and outstanding!

Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A: Interns! They are brave souls venturing forth into the world. Also, these playwrights: Amparo Garcia Crow, John Guare, Adrienne Kennedy, Terrence MacNally, Ruth Margraff, Arthur Miller, Lynn Nottage, Harold Pinter, Jose Rivera, Sarah Ruhl, and Tennessee Williams. These playwrights cracked open my heart and changed my world view. I am not the same for having encountered their writing, vision, passion, and devotion to theater. I am grateful to them.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Theater that is magic. That provokes and pushes boundaries. That poses difficult questions. That reflects the human condition. That shows us how awful and beautiful we can be to one another ...and that we have a choice in how we behave. That uses powerful and provocative language. That introduces us to interesting and compelling characters. That is intimate, funny, honest, scary, ugly, messy, poetic, and beautiful. Theater, that while ephemeral, remains with you forever.

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

A: Be bold, honest, and determined. See as many plays and readings as you can. Make friends with other theater artists. Talk, argue, complain, yell and cry to them about the kind of work you want to be creating, the kind that isn’t being created where you live, and then go create it. Honor and protect your writing time. Don't ever stop writing!

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  My lovely website: www.jacquelinelawton.com

August 5, 2012 from 11:30am to 1:00pm: Staging Strife and Solidarity: Black-Jewish Relations in American Drama at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) annual conference with Kwame Kwei-Armah (Artistic Director, Centerstage), Jacqueline E. Lawton (The Hampton Years/Theater J commission), Ari Roth (Artistic Director, Theater J), and Gavin Witt (Associate Artistic Director, CenterStage), moderated by Faedra Chatard Carpenter (Assistant Professor, University of Maryland) and LaRonika Thomas (Doctoral Candidate, University of Maryland).

World Premiere of The Hampton Years at Theater J under the direction of Shirley Serotsky with performances running May 29th to June 30th, 2013.

I Interview Playwrights Part 462: Nastaran Ahmadi

Nastaran Ahmadi

Hometown:  Nashville, TN

Current Town:  Brooklyn, NY

Q:  What are you bringing to the Orchard Project?

A:  I hope to finish a draft of Rocket Song, which is inspired by Patti Smith's book "Just Kids". The play is about a singer/songwriter duo and incorporates a lot of original songs and music, which is not familiar territory for me, so the writing of this piece has been an exciting venture into the unkown.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I'm working on a couple of plays, both in very nascent stages, that I'm writing under working titles The Bet and Brothers. The first is very loosely inspired by Chekhov's short story of the same name, and the second is about a pair of Iranian brothers who are living in England circa 1950 and the Iranian-American woman who tries to write a play about them in America circa now. I'll work on one of these scripts in the Fall of 2012 when I'm in residence at Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Black Swan Lab. And, I started writing my first feature length screenplay recently, which is proving to be a thrilling ride. I also just finished writing fifteen pages of what I'm pretty sure is the beginning of a web series called "Under Appreciated".

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

A:  When I was seven years old (or perhaps five, or six), I became aware of a thing called Christmas wherein children receive toys for no apparant reason by one Santa Clause on a day in late December. We had no such day at my house, so I set about to correct this injustice. I called in the cavalry in the form of my best friend, Courtney, who came over to tell my parents that there should be a tall green tree in the middle of the living room, and they should buy toys and wrap them up and place them underneath said tree in the middle of the night while my sister and I were asleep. And the next morning, we would all wake up, go to the tree, note the presents and thank Santa Clause for the bounty that my parents had supplied. Courtney instructed us not to acknowledge that my parents were the real givers of these delights, for that would "mess the whole thing up". So, we went to wherever you go to buy a big plastic green tree (the same tree we would re-use for this event for the next ten years) and brought it home. Courtney came over to help us decorate, which seemed more like a chore than a delightful family event. And there it was, in the middle of the living room, Christmas. I patted myself on the back for a job well done, and went off with Courtney to eat pixie sticks and watch Jem and the Holograms, or Knight Rider, or both. I can't remember what I got for that first year of Christmas, but I remember the pride I felt for having ushered America gently into our fray without dismantling the household my parents had worked hard to build. I think that explains a bit about who I am as a writer and as a person. I like to bring people new perspectives, new lenses with which to see the world, but I won't ask you to toss the ones you already have.

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

A:  Does anyone answer this question with anything other than something having to do with money? I'd make it less expensive to produce plays. I'd make more opportunities for production for all the plays that are developed into a state where production is the next logical step and then get forgotten because there are a fifty plays vying for three or four emerging writer production slots. Being in production is the way a writer hones her craft; it's how she learns how her craft is different from another writer's; it's how she completes the journey of her authority over her voice and her story, and it's also how she learns to let go of the play. And I'm actually a firm believer in developing a play, as long as it's being developed towards production. If I could change the fact that so many playwrights find their plays lingering in post-development purgatory, I would.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Polly Carl is my most recent theatrical hero. She wrote this, and in writing that she put her finger on why I feel so underrepresented in the world that supposedly embraces me and my voice. She also put her finger on why it's so difficult to get established institutions to shake off their pre-conceived notions of what journeys their audiences are willing to take. I read her post and felt like the conversation I'd been waiting for us all to have had finally begun. Other heroes include, but are not at all limited to: Edward Albee, Anton Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, John Guare, Naomi Iizuka, Sarah Kane, Lisa Kron, Simon McBurney, Lynn Nottage, Lisa Peterson, Harold Pinter, Wallace Shawn, Sam Shepard, and on, and on, and on.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I'm excited by theater that shifts my heart from whatever position it's in to a new one, while simultaneously taking me on an intellectual journey through a world that vibrates with all the realness of the one where I live, but presents a new paradigm for living that I've never thought to invent before. That kind of story can take the shape of a monologue play on a bare stage, or it can be an athletic event - if you make it bold and specific and scary and funny and thrilling and enervating and brave, then I'm all in.

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

A:  Write. Keep writing. Write more. Every play is a building stone, and you are making a castle. Read. Read plays. Read novels. Read poetry. Read the news. Apply to things. Apply to things repeatedly.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Watch out for a workshop of Rocket Song in the Fall of 2012!

I Interview Playwrights Part 461: Max Posner

photo by Kate Owen

Max Posner

Hometown: Denver, Colorado

Current Town: Brooklyn, New York

Q:  Tell me about the play you'll work on with P73.

A:  The play is called SNORE & OTHER SORTS OF BREATHING. It's a play about a large group of young people, and it takes place at each of their birthday parties over one year. All of them are pursuing "the common good" professionally - working for non-profits, NGO's, immigration law firms. They're breaking up with each other and visiting foreign countries and are very blessed to be very educated. This play is about the difficulty of evolving, together, as an organism of friends, trying to keep relationships the same and do everything "right", whatever that means.

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 11 and followed my sister into her "Creative Dramatics" class. I gathered a grain of courage and went onstage to improvise a scene. Boldly, I decided I was going to be a Pickpocket. The girl I was onstage with was wearing an unusually long T-Shirt. Down to her ankles. In order to "pick" her "pocket", I would need to pull her shirt up. I did. The teacher gasped. Then, the squawking and blushing and insta-gossip of our pubescent peers. I urinated in my cargo pants. My face was very hot. I sat in the men's room alone, legs soaked. It was a terrible, thrilling feeling. I had to go back into that room, I had to tell them I peed myself, perhaps I would say I was sorry, or perhaps I would shout that I wasn't sorry. Those gut feelings: humiliation, agony, and hope - these are the things I'm most interested in.

I took things very seriously as a child, which meant I was laughed at quite often by my own family. I wore shoes that were way too big because they felt right. I would trip down the stairs. I wanted to go to clown college. I've always been interested in accidents, and therefore theatre.

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Samuel Beckett, Wallace Shawn, Maria Irene Fornes. My mentors and teachers: Erik Ehn, Lisa D'Amour, Bonnie Metzgar, Paula Vogel, Greg Moss.

Adrienne Rich, Frank O'Hara. I read poetry, and I think it really informs how I think about plays, because it makes room for multiple meanings. The same poem completely transforms depending on where and when and how it hits you.

Also, this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmO_0tIGo-4

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Theatre that isn't sure what it's imitating, that asks us to learn how to watch it.

I like plays where people don't fully understand each other or themselves. I like plays that really do express the giant sadnesses and wishes and loves of their writers and collaborators. Plays that don't stare too directly into what they are About, because there is a certain mystery or a certain chase we're leaning into. Plays where conflict exists within characters, as much as it exists between them.

I also like to Laugh - to laugh when laughter might be inappropriate, to laugh in multiple directions, as a reflex and a celebration, because something is funny and happening on the body-level.

Q:  Plugs:

A:  There's gonna be a reading of my play THE THING ABOUT AIR TRAVEL at Williamstown Theatre Festival on August 10th, directed by Kerry Whigham.

And stay tuned for more Page 73 presentations in the fall!

I Interview Playwrights Part 460: Tim J. Lord

Tim J. Lord

Hometown: St. Louis, MO

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q:   Tell me about your LA show.

A:  It's called Down in the face of God and it's being produced by this exciting, young company called AthroughZ who are an honest-to-goodness theater company making vibrant, physical theater right in the heart of the film monster's lair. The play began when director Jerry Ruiz was doing a Van Lier Fellowship at Second Stage here in New York. He and the other fellows were interested in putting together an evening of 1-acts based on Greek myths & plays and he approached me about doing a riff on The Bacchae. I took Euripides' idea, transferred it present day Southern Illinois, then swirled in various other Greek stories set in Thebes. I created a 4-hander that I was real excited about and started sending it around to no avail. Then last December Caitlin Hart, the director and co-artistic director of AthroughZ, contacted me about producing the play. The catch: they had a large company of actors at their disposal and would I be interested in adding characters. After I put my brains back in my head, I said, "How many total characters are we talking about?" Caitlin said, "Seven?" And I said, "How about eight?" They flew me out in February to spend a week workshopping the new version and now it's about to wrap up a 3-week run at Studio/Stage in Hollywood.

Q:  What else are you working on now?

A:  I created a whole world/faith/mythology for Down... and I have this ongoing love affair with the Midwest which gets tangled up with a love/hate relationship with Aeschylus, so I decided to rediscover and re-imagine his lost Oedipus trilogy. Down... is the 3rd part. And when the whole thing is done it'll comprise 3 generations of betrayal and striving for redemption in my version of life on the Mississippi. Then there are two plays that revolve around military veterans. The first is a play called Fault & Fold and follows two sets of siblings--a brother and sister in Iowa and a brother and sister in Afghanistan--as their lives become intertwined following an act of violence; and the other is a commission for the Veterans Center for the Performing Arts called Over Before We Get There. The VCPA exists to use theater to help vets transition back to civilian life. They were handed a collection of short stories written by Nick Corea, a Marine who served in Vietnam, and told they could adapt them for use by the company and I was asked to find a way to make that happen.

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

A:  The story, as my parents tell it, goes like this: I was pretty young and we were hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park--I was actually riding in one of those kid-carriers on my dad's back. The wind was whipping about, blowing through the cliffs above us, and I said something along the lines of, "The rocks are talking to me, Daddy." So my folks knew long before I did that I was going to grow up to be a creative type. Plus, I'm still a serious hiker and mountain climber, so nothing's changed much in the last 35 years.

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

A:  Burn the Regionals. Then see what we can build from their ashes. Or, at the very least, I'd like to reignite the idea that vibrant, exciting, new theater can be made outside of New York.

How do we find new ways of creating? How do we create works for an early 21st century audience? How do we get young people back in the theater? Some of the Regionals are starting to find ways to address all this, but they need to be doing more. Subscribers are literally dying off and young people don't even realize that there are actual, living playwrights creating new works. The furor over the announcement of the Guthrie's 2012-13 season is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I have great hope for the new artistic leadership at Actors Theater of Louisville, but I'd like to see more bold moves like that across the country. The regional movement was a revolution. It's time for a new one.

And while we're at it, maybe we should take down Off-Broadway too(?)

Q:  Who are or were your theatrical heroes?

A:  Rich Moran, Liz Carlin-Metz, the now defunct Primitive Science, Terry Gilliam, Anne Bogart, Paul Vogel, everyone in Theatre & Dance at UC San Diego, and my parents who have found a way to support this theater habit of mine through the years

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  The kind that leaves me feeling out of sorts. Primitive Science created a play called Hunger based on Kafka's hunger artist stories, and I left not even knowing if what I'd seen was theater; but the result of engaging with work like that was that it expanded my idea of what theater could be and do. The SITI Company's bobrauschenbergamerica and War of the Worlds affected me like that too.

Or plays that I just can't stop thinking about for one reason or another: Julia Cho's Piano Teacher, Alex Lewin's The Near East, Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice, Tracey Letts' August: Osage County. I call them "gauntlet plays" because they challenge me to do more with my own work.

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

A:  No one's ever going to pay you enough to live on in this business. I'm a crazy optimist but dreams of making money from the plays you write should be forced out of your head. Please approach playwriting with that in mind. I don't say that to scare anyone away from the form. Rather I want there to be more of us out there, asking the tough questions, telling the difficult stories in a medium that forces human beings to actually live with and listen to one another. But unless you're a trust fund baby, you need to find a job you don't hate that will both pay the bills and allow you the time and space to live as a writer. This is advice no one ever gave me when I was starting out and if I'd known it was going to take as long as it has to start getting noticed, I would've looked different ways to support myself in the meantime. And by "meantime" I mean yesterday, today, tomorrow...

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  If you're in LA June 2-4, go see Cry, Havoc! at the Veterans Center for the Performing Arts: http://govcpa.com

My website: http://timjlord.wordpress.com

Journal of the revolution: http://bloodinthestone.wordpress.com