The American Pilot Received Its U.S

PHYSICAL POETRY

David Grieg in conversation with Caridad Svich

avid Greig’s play The American Pilot received its U.S. premiere December 2006 at Manhattan Theatre Club, in New York City, under Lynne Meadow’s direction. Although Greig is a top-drawer talent in his native Scotland Dand across Europe, his work has only recently been finding its way to American shores. Of the same generation as Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Phyllis Nagy, and Anthony Neilson, Greig’s work is both of and apart from the 1990s UK new brutal- ist writing movement—“of” because his work shares with Ravenhill and Kane’s a formalist, classicist concern with the effects of violence on society and individuals, and “apart” because his dramas tend to focus outward instead of inward. His plays avoid the “bed-sit” and instead stretch across open spaces and different countries. Greig’s plays are often epic in scope and historical in nature, whether the emphasis is on recent or ancient history. Carving his stories with great detail and depth of vision, Greig writes primarily tales of individuals struggling with the burdens and regrets of memory. His central figures—usually men, and usually loners—are pos- sessed by a desire to remake history (their own or their country’s). His plays include Pyrenees, Outlying Islands, Victoria, and The cosmonaut’s last message to the woman he once loved in the former Soviet Union, and have been produced by, among others, Paines Plough, Traverse Theatre, and the RSC. His translation of Camus’s Caligula was presented at the Donmar Warehouse in an award-winning production in 2003. Greig is co-founder of the collective Suspect Culture in Glasgow. This interview was conducted via e-mail in early December 2006 while Greig was literally in transit to the U.S. to witness the stateside premiere of The American Pilot.

I remember when I first read The American Pilot last year after its RSC premiere at the Other Place, Statford-upon-Avon, in April 2005, and I was struck by its willful, emotional jaggedness as well as its sense of rage and outrage. I wanted to ask first off about the quality, though, of fear in the piece. The Pilot’s fear of his own displacement, the fear mixed with fascination/disgust and a hint of love the community has of him and how this fear is for you situated in the structure and motion of the text as a marker of the culture of fear we all live in.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.51 by guest on 30 September 2021 I suppose it is a play about fear but that was not a conscious intention of mine. I ought, I suppose, to give a context to the play’s writing which might illuminate my answer. I wrote the play in February of 2003. It seemed plain that there would be an invasion of Iraq but that invasion had not yet happened. I was writing Pyrenees at the time and had no intentions of writing about war. I was sitting in a café preparing to teach a class on playwriting and, for that purpose, reading Heiner Müller, and I re-read a monologue of his spoken by a Russian soldier on the front in World War II. The monologue begins—I’m quoting from memory here—“We saw him coming, THE GERMAN.” The monologue continues with THE GER- MAN capitalized always. In one magical instant I had the thought—“We saw him, THE AMERICAN, and he was the most beautiful man we had ever seen.” In that sentence and that moment I saw the whole play from beginning to end. I wrote it in two days, sent it to a few friends who commented. I made some changes and by the end of a fortnight the play existed in the form you see it today.

Oddly, it didn’t find a home easily. As an uncommissioned work it was hard to program and so when it came out people saw it as a “post-Iraq” play whereas, in fact, it is pre-Iraq. So—to return to your question about fear. The fear for me is fear of the other. The capitalized ones. THE GERMAN, or THE AMERICAN, or THE TERRORIST. That is all.

Pyrenees and The American Pilot premiered in short succession in the UK last spring. It seems very clear to me that the plays speak to each other in some way. Not that they’re companion pieces in a strict sense, but that they both look at “strangeness of self” and the emotional terrain of lostness (conscious and unconscious) in a manner that’s private in the former, and more obviously public in the latter. How do these plays speak to you from their respective premiere productions in the UK and your process with them?

I hadn’t thought of them as so related but, in fact, you are right. They are in dialogue with each other. The American Pilot was born suddenly in the middle of Pyrenees. Almost literally in the gap between act one of Pyrenees and act two. I fear that all my work concerns lostness in some way or another; homelessness; identity; not quite knowing who one is. This is not because I want to explore these issues but because—whatever I intend to explore—these issues emerge. When I teach workshops I talk about how we cannot hide our stories when we write fiction. They seem invisible to us but they are as visible to everyone else as if we had a big flashing neon sign on our head saying—I HAVE COMMITMENT ISSUES—or—I AM OBSESSED WITH DEATH—I WANT TO HAVE SADOMASOCHISTIC SEX DOES THAT MAKE ME A BAD PERSON? The simple act of making up a story will flush this stuff out.

My conscious brain will tell me that I am writing about war (a good and fine thing to do. Not revealing at all.) but my unconscious creative mind will seize its chance to tell the story of Loneliness which is, frankly, the only thing it cares about. It’s unavoidable. Which is, of course, why most adults suppress their creativity. An artist

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.51 by guest on 30 September 2021 is simply someone naive enough, brave enough or needy enough to let their story be revealed. So—lost men—I guess that’s my neon sign. It’s the story I have to tell.

Pyrenees received its U.S. premiere at Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles during the summer of 2006 under Neel Keller’s direction and now The American Pilot premieres at Manhattan Theatre Club under Lynne Meadow’s direction in New York City, and Casanova premiered in Chicago at Collaboraction. This is a fairly standard question but one that I am always interested in: how do different audiences react to your work? UK to U.S.?

I know the reviews are different.Pyrenees certainly seemed to have a popular response from the audience which was not reflected in the reviews. The same thing, I am told, applies to Casanova in Chicago. So perhaps we could say that U.S. theatre critics have a different response to my work. I was certainly brought low when idly self-Googling this summer I found a review of Pyrenees which referred to me as “mid-career Scottish playwright who’s never really made it over here.” Ouch.

One interesting thing is that blogs are now putting theatre critics out of business. I read many blogs by theatergoers about The American Pilot and they were all much more positive than Charles Isherwood in the New York Times. So, a serious point might be that my plays tend to appeal to people’s feelings whilst seeming to appeal to their intellects. The critics love to do battle with the play’s intellectual themes which are, usually, rather flimsy, while the audience is busy experiencing the play’s feelings—rather more complex and strange, I think.

Do you learn different things about the way your works play in space and time depending on audience reaction/reception? For example, in The American Pilotthe nationality of the pilot is central to the story but the way in which an audience receives how you’ve rendered the Pilot and his situation will have quite a significantly different resonance in the U.S., I think, than it did in Stratford’s Other Place.

I only ever really write them for myself so cultural indicators don’t tend to affect my work. I always learn from any audience: technical things about storytelling, timing, dialogue etc. Generally I’m surprised by how similar audiences are. Outlying Islands was, I thought, too culturally specific to travel. In fact it has gone more widely than most of my plays, including playing in central Europe. I had thought it wouldn’t play anywhere where they didn’t have—well—islands.

In reference to questions above, throughout your work the making and unmaking of identity construction keeps surfacing. From The cosmonaut’s last message to the woman he once loved in the former Soviet Union to The Speculator to Outlying Islands and so on, there is the shifting of temporal planes theatrically, and also personal planes of existence. Even in as rooted and anchored a play as Outlying Islands, the characters feel as if they might drown at any moment and become transformed by the earth’s inexorable- ness. In Casanova, the construct of the sex idol is the axis of the play. In San Diego, you destabilize metatheatrically your persona as author present in the text.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.51 by guest on 30 September 2021 For me, persona is theatrical. It is always a role, a part, a ghost which walks within our body. That is how I experience myself and my disquiet about that uncertainty; my yearning for the rootedness which might occur were ghost and body to finally fuse—these are the fuels of my writing. I believe that character is ungraspable. It is a ghostly function of memory. I think that in theatre—where “the character” floats around the actor’s body, one cannot help but express or present that ungraspability.

As dramatists, we work with the language(s) of the theatre in all its facets. In The American Pilot you have the figure of a Translator who as much as anyone holds the Pilot’s language and fate in his hands. The layers of translation—also present in Pyrenees—affect how and what the other figures believe about the Pilot. As a dramatist who is also a translator, how do you view the process and act of translation/interpretation?

I come back to it again and again. The new Suspect Culture show, Futurology, is set at a global conference of diplomats come together to discuss climate change, and we will play a game with the audience where, like delegates, we give them an earpiece so that they can hear simultaneous “translation” of the speeches. Of course this will be playful. So, for example, one delegate’s passionate speech will be flatly, dully and badly translated. Another’s apparently dull speech will be given a vivid and sympathetic translation. So—it’s another obsession.

Why? Again I think it is part of my experience of being human that what we say and what me mean are achingly different things. For me, most language is simply another interaction between humans, like chimps grooming. The meanings of the words do not matter, the speech act is more physical. Each speech an act of touch, or of display, of subordination or of joyful release. This is, of course, very much how theatre dialogue works. The words are never as interesting as the “subtext.”

I am very interested in poetry, something which I suspect I may share with “the language playwrights” that often leads people to think poets are interested in intellectual meaning when, of course, poems always begin with sound and rhythm. The physical aspect of words. So—for me—play dialogue is physical first and meaningful second. Which is why I get so upset when critics ask me what I am trying to “say” with my work. If I could “say” it, I would “say” it. I can’t. That’s why I write plays.

In The American Pilot, how affected do you think the figures and the world are depicted in the piece by the translated messages from pop culture and filtered news that they receive?

Very. In this, I am, like the villagers in the play, not American but steeped in the culture of America. I know the songs. I am familiar with the vistas. I even feel patriotic when I sing “This Land Is Your Land” with my kids as we roll along in the car. “From California, to the New York Island.” Well, no it isn’t my land or indeed theirs but it sure as hell feels like it is. There perhaps is an analogy here with copyright issues in popular songs. I feel I ought not to have to pay or ask permis- sion to use a Beatles song or Toto’s “Africa” in a play of mine. Because, I think, I

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.51 by guest on 30 September 2021 didn’t ask for your song to colonize my head. These snatches and fragments are the material of my dreams. So America has colonized our dreams. Many of us are, in a cultural sense, American. This land is our land. This is particularly true in the Middle East, by the way. Which is why, of course, young men feel so particularly humiliated by America’s rejection of them. This is the predicament of The Translator in The American Pilot.

I go back and forth on the question of nationality and how a writer expresses the national inside his or her voice. As a hybrid American, for instance, I always feel that my writing is inside the U.S.-dominant strain—to the prophetic and the haunted, the righteous and the second mind of the blues, wanderlust and rootedness, and the quality of abundance in the U.S. landscape—and outside of it—in both island and continent-based Caribbean and Latin American sensibilities, as befits a significant part of my heritage. Of course, a sense of the global is always alive in the works, in some more than others, depending on how localized the focus is. And yet, at day’s end, I recognize something intrinsically American in the essential voice of all the plays. As a Scottish playwright and a world dramatist, where and how do you recognize your allegiances and non-allegiances on the page?

I have written and rewritten this opening sentence six times, each time the cursor scrolling back and wiping my attempt at an answer. So, hold this answer under erasure. Scotland is to me, as one’s family is to other writers. I rarely write directly or recognizably about Scotland, just as most writers are not often directly autobio- graphical. But I am always writing from Scotland: Of it? About it? Despite it? Of course as I type you can’t hear my accent, which is barely Scottish. I was brought up in Nigeria where I attended an American Baptist Missionary school. My first accent was, in fact, American. When I returned to Scotland, aged 13, I had first to lose my American voice and somehow was never able to “fake” a Scottish one. I resorted to a sort of RP neutral. Now, wherever I go in Scotland, people ask me where I’m from. Or how long am I up for? So my experience of being Scottish is one of being intensely and viscerally attached to a place in which I am perceived as a stranger.

The American Pilot is a complicated and ambitious attempt to take a portrait of a point in historical time, this historical time, which is also linked to ancient time. It also has a structural and sonic relationship to modernity but it is ultimately distended, untethered, from it. When I read the play, I think about the war in Iraq and other recent wars too—how the piece lives between time, and by the end, somehow suspended in time. In the memories the figures have, for example, of the Pilot. And his captivating magical beauty, the beauty that must be destroyed, the beauty that is itself a destroyer. In what manner do you position this piece and other works of yours, historically, through your process or research as well as through the piece’s relationship to the reader/audience?

In the end I was relieved that The American Pilotdidn’t debut on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. When it played in Stratford there was, already, some distance between it and the events that had inspired it. I think the play is not really about Iraq at all: it

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.51 by guest on 30 September 2021 is certainly not based on Iraq. If anything I imagined it taking place in Tadjikistan, or Darfur. But, of course, now that the war in Iraq is going so horribly wrong and American opinion is on the turn then—in New York—the play will inevitably be seen as a commentary upon those events.

I felt there was a revealing line at the end of The New York Times review. The reviewer appears to chastise me for failing to focus enough on the Pilot at a time when American military personnel are suffering and dying in Iraq. This seemed to me to be precisely the play’s point. Americans are allowed to have stories and lives and complex characters whereas the three thousand Iraqis dying every month in that horrible war are presented as numbers, or, at best, uncomplex ciphers “SUNNI” or “INSURGENT” or “VICTIM” or “WARLORD.” All my play tried to do was restore to those people we routinely label their stories and, to place the American in the position of “THE AMERICAN.” I do not do this to punish the American character, or even to make some easy point about “see how you like it.” I do it because labeling is what we do to THE OTHER. I wanted to examine that process and show how complex it it.

The American Pilot possesses an aggression and violence that is savage and almost expres- sionistic. It’s an unleashing of sorts. Almost mad. And very ancient Greek, the cracked Dionysian energy on the page is palpable. What led you to explore limits of violence and damage in this play?

Rage. Sheer impotent rage. I saw a man, or some men, lead the world into a horrible, predictable, vicious bloody conflict that I knew would result in the ending of thousands of peoples’ stories. I knew, you knew, the dogs on the bloody street knew that this war was an act of monstrous vanity. We are supposed to be surprised they found no weapons of mass destruction? My mate Justin knew Saddam was no threat and he doesn’t know much about much, he just sits in the pub and reads the sports pages but he does have a strong sense of when people are cooking up bullshit. People speak their stories and the more Bush and Blair went on about WMDs the more you knew, just knew, that they weren’t there. It’s like those people who say over and over again how “crazy” they are. And you know that this means they are almost the definition of straight. Well, Justin and I knew that sons of our friends (in the Black Watch) would be sent to kill and die for no good reason. What is worse is that I don’t particularly believe the war was a conspiracy or an oil grab. I think it was a war propelled by sheer, stupid, male, ego propped up by an idiotic God. (By that I mean the God these men create for themselves is a God who never challenges them or says anything surprising to them. Most Christians I know, and Muslims for that matter, are perpetually surprised by their God, forever challenged. But these men use God to back their lumpen self worth.) So. Rage.

I think about what Aleks Sierz deemed the “in-yer-face” plays of the 1990s in Britain, which never quite caught on here. The U.S. hasn’t really had its neo-Jacobean phase theatrically. And I am not comparing this play to those written by Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill or Anthony Neilson, writers as distinct as they come. As are you. But I do

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.51 by guest on 30 September 2021 wonder first off, how you’ve responded to being part of the same generation of dramatists, yet somehow one who was nevertheless working “outside” of what came to be understood as a “brand,” and whether you think your concerns as a dramatist were misunderstood critically by audiences at all during the 1990s?

Scotland managed to escape some of that stuff. I was always seen along with David Harrower and Steven Greenhorn as a new generation of Scottish writers. We were understood to be poetic, theatrical, and intellectual. In fact, I debuted a couple of years before the “in-yer-face” stuff and inherited my writing more from Martin Crimp or Caryl Churchill. Besides, my plays were not on in London very much during the peak of that period. So I escaped the branding. At the time I felt sidelined, a little, particularly in Europe where they seemed very eager to stage blood and sperm plays. But now I feel very glad because I am now seen as myself and do not stand or fall by the fashionability of a movement.

Now than it’s been 11 years since Kane’s Blasted, where do you feel new writing in Scotland and England is heading?

It’s been a little boring for a while. We are in a cyclical moment where directors are turning towards site-specific events. More classics are being revived. Devised shows are back. This is very much like the landscape in the UK in the early 90s. So, this new phase will last a few years and then—in 2010—there will be another explosion of playwriting led by someone who is currently at university.

Here in the U.S., it’s clear there has been something of a seismic shift in new writing: from an insistent, personally symbolic, poetic manner toward more alternately naturalistic and highly whimsical work that insists on a familiar system of theatrical signs. I’m part of the generation that is clearly caught in between: inheriting what Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, José Rivera, and their forebears were and have been doing, and witnessing at the same time the 13P, post–Richard Maxwell lineage of writers. And I know that the awareness of my position as a dramatist affects the choices I make on the page, the stories I choose to tell and the manner in which I tell them.

I think, if you forgive me for saying this, you need a revolution in American playwriting. It’s my strong impression that plays are nurtured and developed for far too long which drains the blood from them and like milksops and mummy’s girls they become too weak to go on the stage. In the meantime film writing in America and television writing—because it has direct contact with the audience—is in a period of some artistic glory. Any time I speak to American playwrights they are desperate to get their work out there. They want to write things in a week and throw them on the stage. To stand in front of the audience. I quite like the Richard Maxwells and so on but really I think they’re a side issue. American playwrights need a tea party at which they throw the workshops and directors overboard.

Finally, back to a basic: but what are you working on at present? Any new collabora- tions? Translations?

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.51 by guest on 30 September 2021 I’m really proud of a play I wrote for teenagers called Yellow Moon which I think reached out beyond its initial schools audience and seemed to strike a chord with young people who perhaps are not normally seen in the theatre. That play will be revived early next year. I’m currently writing a play for The Traverse, called Damas- cus, about a man who sells educational software who goes on a trip to Syria and nearly but not quite falls in love. I’m writing/dramaturging Futurology for Suspect Culture, which will premiere April [2007]. I’m doing a translation of The Bacchae for The National Theatre of Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival next year. I’m also working on a few film and TV projects.

What kinds of stories or themes or issues are you attracted to right now that you think might transform themselves into a play or two?

Forests are appearing everywhere in my work at the moment. Fathers abound. And age. You just can’t get away from it. Age. “Mid Career.” It still hurts.

I think about when Baudrillard came to the U.S., or when Martin Crimp did for that matter and out came The Treatment! I know it’s not your first time in the U.S. but just thinking about how these recent U.S. premieres might have an effect on your work?

Well, the trip I took to La Jolla Playhouse to see The cosmonaut’s last message resulted very directly in San Diego. I think a trip to New York for readings of Outlying Islands and San Diego produced, to an extent at least, The American Pilot. Tomorrow morn- ing I fly out to New York to see The American Pilot. I wonder.

CARIDAD SVICH is resident playwright of New Dramatists, founder of the theatre alliance NoPassport, and contributing editor for TheatreForum. She has written over 40 plays and 15 translations, and has edited and co- edited several books on theatre and performance.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.2.51 by guest on 30 September 2021