Contemporary American Playwriting The Issue of Legacy

Jason Grote, Caridad Svich, and Anne Washburn in conversation with Ken Urban

espite proclamations to the contrary, there is a surge of new writing in the American theatre. Not plays masquerading as films or TV shows, but seri- ous plays written by writers with a passionate commitment to the stage. DBut since this new generation of theatre artists is less centralized than previous ones, working in cities and towns across the U.S., it is hard to talk about a specific movement or scene. For those working in New York City, Off-Off Broadway no longer adequately describes the theatre that these playwrights create. Such writers do not want to be defined in relation to Broadway, for Broadway ceased to be a venue for adventurous new writing decades ago. This conversation is an attempt by four playwrights to define some of the identifying characteristics and concerns of this new writing. The starting point is the issue of legacy: How do the historical avant-garde, the Language Playwrights of the 1970s and 80s (Mac Wellman, Jeffrey Jones, Len Jenkin), and the classics influence contemporary playwriting? To gain a better sense of what is happening now, it proves beneficial to look back.

The conversation featured Jason Grote, Caridad Svich, and Anne Washburn. Jason Grote is the recipient of the 2006 P73 Playwriting Fellowship and co-chair of the SoHo Rep Writer/Director Lab. He is writing The Wal-Mart Plays for the Working Theater in New York. Caridad Svich is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and editor of Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries and Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks. Some of her translations are published in Federico García Lorca: Impossible Theater. Anne Washburn is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and the founder of the Pataphysics Playwriting Workshops at the Flea Theater in New York. Her play Apparition recently ran Off-Broadway at the Connelly Theatre, and is published in New Downtown Now. Playwright and director Ken Urban moderated the discussion, which was conducted on September 27, 2005, in New York City.

URBAN: I want to begin with the avant-garde. The avant-garde has taken a beating in the past decade. For some, it has become a synonym for the incomprehensible or willfully obscure, while others have argued about its presumed demise. But if we understand the avant-garde as an artistic project that seeks new forms of expression and challenges received ideas, then it remains very much alive, even if the time of

© 2006 Jason Grote, Caridad Svich, and Anne Washburn PAJ 84 (2006), pp. 11–22.  11

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.11 by guest on 28 September 2021 the historical avant-garde—dada, surrealism, and futurism—is long past. How does this legacy of the avant-garde influence contemporary American playwriting?

SVICH: Historically, the avant-garde is against commodified trends in the arts, against works that live happily in an audience’s comfort zone. Instead, it explores and experiments with the new or the not-yet-known. If the works of the theatrical avant-garde are primarily marked by experiments in form, it is because the works are seeking a “truer” expression of life: a more “real” realism. The American avant-garde is also interested in older forms of performance, for example, melodrama, vaudeville, and the burlesque. American theatre, especially for the past 20 years, has been asking itself, “What is American writing?” Originally, American writing was imported. Early American works mainly copied British dramaturgy. Around the 1790s, there was the development of the Yankee character and the beginning of a theatrical vocabulary that was uniquely American. But even so, there has always been a tension between homegrown work and English models of writing. American theatre has a complex that it is not good enough. You can see it in the kind of work that is imported or translated. We have practically no access to the contemporary theatre, for example, of Spain, Argentina, Mexico, or Venezuela. We still are under the burden of the Brits. But the avant-garde helps us ask in its stubbornly resilient way, “Who are we as Americans? What is American theatre?” The foundation of American playwriting is ragtag; it is songs and scenes, sketches and tableaus. How do we take that history and make it speak to an audience? We want an audience to say, “That’s mine,” to feel they have indeed a sense of ownership about the work as audiences do in other countries. Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepherd, David Mamet, Stephen Sondheim, and August Wilson are all dramatists who speak in a distinctively recog- nizable U.S. voice, but that is not the whole picture. American drama is essentially about orphans and outlaws. How do we write this into our theatre when we have been copying dramaturgical models chiefly from Anglo cultures?

WASHBURN: One thing that I think characterizes a lot of new writing is a healthy respect for entertainment value, even as the work is challenging and difficult. It’s something that separates American theatre from most European theatre. There is a giddy American love of pleasure.

URBAN: And that relates back to what Caridad was talking about: melodrama, vaudeville—

WASHBURN: The Wild West show—

SVICH: The exuberant decadence of spectacle. So much avant-garde work is entertaining. The received idea of the avant-garde, though, is that it is anything but entertaining.

URBAN: There is a high art avant-garde tradition, but there is also a more populist idea of the avant-garde, as contradictory as that might sound.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.11 by guest on 28 September 2021 GROTE: The influence of dada and surrealism can be found in a TV program like Monty Python. The avant-garde has come down to us in entertainment, even if we don’t always recognize the source. Challenging an audience and entertaining them are not mutually exclusive goals. Think about Brecht or Chekhov. Both of them were very funny, but at the same time, they were challenging their audiences. In a sense, that is the social contract between audience and playwright.

URBAN: Thinking about America’s own avant-garde, what is the legacy ofthe experimental playwrights of the 1970s and 80s on our generation? How have playwrights like Mac Wellman, Jeffrey Jones, Len Jenkins and Matthew Maguire influenced new writing?

SVICH: So many of us went through graduate school or training programs and were taught by Jones, Wellman, and Maria Irene Fornes and their protégés. A whole assortment of idiosyncratic, significant artists are still teaching rather than going to Hollywood or writing for TV. I think that is partly why our generation is so free, because we have received all of this direct transmission from these writers. Their generation rejected convention in order to liberate and rediscover the U.S. dramatic voice. As a result, we can take from the avant-garde, but we can also take from more conventional forms of writing to make our own work. We never had to make the radical break on our own. We inherited it.

GROTE: When your teachers in graduate school disagree with one another, that is a really important experience.

WASHBURN: You are in one class and then you go to another. You bounce between different mindsets in this artificial way during the course of the day. It has a strong impact on how you think about writing plays. You are always questioning what you receive.

URBAN: I would characterize a great deal of new writing as naturalistic on the surface. There is often a clear narrative or identifiable characters. But those things are subverted or parodied. The scenario might feel familiar, but the play unfolds in unexpected ways. Language is never transparent. What appears like a play set in an identifiable location—a living room, an office space—becomes unrecognizable, though familiar. That strangeness comes from the influence of writers like Wellman and Jones. I see that legacy in our plays as well as other writers of our generation: Anne-Marie Healey, David Bucci, Erin Courtney, and Carlos Murillo, to name but four. Yet at the same time, there is still a pretense of naturalism and that is something you do not always get in a Wellman or Jones play.

WASHBURN: I think many playwrights also draw heavily from performance. In that tradition, the text is more of a blueprint. Sometimes that makes it harder for an audience to understand a play immediately.

URBAN: It can also make new plays difficult to read, or at least, it requires a dif- ferent kind of reading.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.11 by guest on 28 September 2021 GROTE: Ruth Margraff is a good example. When I first read her work, I was left scratching my head. But after I saw one of her plays, I was completely swept away by it. It is a question of what medium is best for experiencing the work.

URBAN: But while there is an interest in performance, I do not think that we reject the well-made play with the same ferocity that other generations did. One of my favorite nights in the theatre was seeing August Wilson’s Jitney. I would not call Wilson an influence on my work, but I appreciate what Wilson is doing and I see the value of naturalistic theatre when it is well done like that, when the line between actor and character vanishes.

WASHBURN: That is one of the primal pleasures in theatre.

GROTE: The trouble that I have with the well-made play is that I am always ten pages ahead of it. And that robs me of the transcendence that I want in theatre. People get into these ideological “art wars” about naturalism versus anti-naturalism. But the work that sticks with me does not come down to genre or style. It is work that holds you at arm’s length, but at the same time engages you; it has a strong sense of emotion that is intensely powerful.

SVICH: The menu has changed. When I go to the record store, I have so many choices. It’s the same with theatre. There are all these different kinds of plays being written. Some fall under a certain school, while others are forging their own path. Variety is making a comeback.

GROTE: There is an interesting tension in a lot of new work, between a greater level of democratization in the arts and a desire to challenge the audience, to make work that requires a level of expertise. There are greater levels of accessibility in new writing coupled with a serious need to make art that will outlast its creator. Many theatre artists are making work that frequently tries to do things that are in opposi- tion to each other. And that is exciting.

URBAN: All four of us are working on adaptations or translations of Greek plays. Interest in the classics has never vanished, but there is a renewed interest in the last few years. Is there something about this historical moment that makes the Greeks feel vital and contemporary?

GROTE: Maybe the interest in the Greeks is a groping for something tragic and universal. Some of the unintentional effects of the upheavals of the 60s and 70s have proven to be reactionary. Many of the big struggles gave way to self-indulgence. In Nietzsche, tragedy is the way we collectively mourn. The idea of collective has been utterly decimated, not just in theatre, but also in most aspects of individual expres- sion. There’s a sense that we can’t possibly understand what anyone else is going through. What draws me back to the Greeks is a sense of universal knowledge: that an audience knows the stories of Oedipus and Antigone. It is a shared context. I did an adaptation of Antigone. That play has been adapted to death, but that gave

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.11 by guest on 28 September 2021 Top: John ( Judd Jones) and Mary (Lee Eddy) in Caridad Svich’s Fugitive Pieces (a play with songs), directed by Jason Neulander. Photo: Courtesy Sarah Bork Hamilton/ Salvage Vanguard Theatre; Bottom: James (Tristan Wright), Josephine (Jodie Schell) and Eberstadt ( Jeffrey Landman) in Ken Urban’s The Absence of Weather, directed by Mark Seldis. Photo: Courtesy Moving Arts.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.11 by guest on 28 September 2021 me the freedom to play around with it more. When you are dealing with familiar characters, you can really push the audience more and be much less faithful.

SVICH: It is also about the times we live in: war, class struggle, and social division. The things we are dealing with are the things the Greeks dealt with. Euripides was the first radical playwright. And his versions of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are our parents. When I wrote Iphigenia . . . (a rave fable), my duty as a writer was to enter the inherited playground of war, sacrifice, power, and passion, and see how that mythic and literary legacy was still alive. Those stories resonate because they are inside of us. Even those of us who decide that we don’t belong to the Western canon must meet it at some point. We have to pass through it as writers, just in the way Eugene O’Neill did.

URBAN: But even though they are familiar to many, the classics are a blank slate. We don’t know how these plays were staged and in some cases, we don’t know if we have the full text or not. It is a shared history, but also an invented one, subject to change. Anne, you call your Orestes a loose translation, not an adaptation, of Euripides’ play.

WASHBURN: I don’t speak Ancient Greek—although I’m working with people who do—and so my relationship to the text is kind of proximate, but it’s really in the spirit of a translation. I don’t want to reinvent it in any way; I just want to make the original text performable. Most translations are by poets and academics and they don’t know how to imagine the line on stage. The placement of a word can mean the difference between an actor sounding good and an actor sounding like an idiot.

URBAN: Do you think American playwrights are interested in the idea of the tragic?

WASHBURN: I think many playwrights right now are trying to find a way to express the tragic in a way that is not dismissible. One reason that Euripides is so appealing is his plays have this incredible bitterness coupled with an incredible sense of humor. His sense of irony is so assured. It feels completely contemporary. The current obses- sion with irony comes from the desire to find a way to be painfully sincere.

URBAN: Sincere, but not sentimental, honest, but not earnest.

WASHBURN: We are living in an era that is disintegrating and we’re trying to be strong and face up to it.

SVICH: It is also about trying to remember in a world that is constantly forgetting. Going back to the classics is one way to do that. I wouldn’t use the word “sincerity,” but “purity.” It is an impulse to look back to something pure.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.11 by guest on 28 September 2021 GROTE: That craving for the tragic is a desire for something that is real. Audiences want a play or television show where the protagonist might get killed because it’s cathartic.

SVICH: The tragic doesn’t want to fix social ills, but to make a space for those pain- ful feelings to be shared in a way that might be constructive for society.

URBAN: We have been thinking about legacy in terms of aesthetics, but how do institutions and economics impact the new writing scene?

GROTE: One thing that I have been thinking about lately is the role of political economy in the creation of theatre. At the height of the American avant-garde, there were so many artists in New York creating with one another and taking advantage of cheap space. That is no longer possible in New York. We could go out to rural Pennsylvania and have an enormous theatre space if we wanted, but the audience wouldn’t necessarily be there.

WASHBURN: People don’t think about a life in the theatre because we are not taught that it has any value or worth—

URBAN: Or that it’s even possible. But how has something like RAT—that “non- organization” or loose association of “raggedy-ass theatres,” all devoted to making “Big Cheap Theater”—empowered our generation of theatre makers?

WASHBURN: RAT helped a lot of writers to start think of new writing as a group thing, rather than a solitary undertaking. Suddenly, there was this sense of group identity and shared aesthetics.

SVICH: It is also about sharing resources as well. RAT’s central idea was that artists are empowered and we can support each other, advocate for each other, and create interventions. For example, bringing a production of a play to a city where a play like that would never get done. RAT created awareness about how decentralized the American theatre scene is. It’s about the U.S., folks; it’s not really all about New York, even if the New York Times would like you to think otherwise. RAT also helped discourage a culture of product and mass consumption. It encouraged individuality and the creation of plays as idiosyncratic as our vast landscape. It helped us embrace and celebrate the essential weirdness of American writing.

GROTE: What RAT did was not isolated in theatre, but part of a general trend to emphasize a “Do-It-Yourself” mentality as opposed to relying on institutions. We have this sea of well-educated theatre artists, either coming out of MFA programs or not, and at the same time, there is an institutional crisis. But rather than wait around for institutions to recognize us, we find ways to make the work. It is not a deliberate rejection of institutions, but a realization that we cannot rely on them. We have to create our own opportunities.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.11 by guest on 28 September 2021 Ken Urban has developed new work with Lincoln Center and SoHo Rep in New York City, Annex Theater in Seattle, and Son of Semele Ensemble in Los Angeles. His play The Female Terrorist Project is published in New York Theatre Review, and he is completing a book-length study called Cruel Britannia: British Theatre in the 1990s.

Excerpts from the authors’ plays

From Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable) by Caridad Svich.

(A view from the camera. Iphigenia remains. She is both live and on the screen.)

Iphigenia: Crash. I am not cut, but I am bleeding. There is black sand on my feet, but no water. Only the sound of waves rushing. I am standing. I have wings. They grow out of my shoulder blades Out of the veil of the TV screen. I am not cut, but I am bleeding.

Crash. I remember falling, Kissing Through the garden, To the neon lights on the street, Splitting me into threads of skin. Wings lift me. I am moving. I am at the edge of the city. I am atop the aircraft hangar and its beams of green. Boys, girls, and a million vacant eyes. Look at me.

I stand on the metal ledge. Black liquid sand slipping off my skin. The story has been told again. A wreath has been placed upon Iphigenia’s head.

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From Kawaisoo (The Pity of Things) by Jason Grote.

(A 24-hour grocery store in an affluent suburb. Fall 2001, approximately 2 a.m.)

Ellie: Michael, the banality of this place is exactly the quality that makes it holy. Can I—I know that this is not the appropriate time to dwell on such things, but when I first got the news—the first news, you and the slut, not this news—I came here—not for any therapeutic reason, you understand, but because we needed groceries—and found enormous comfort, enormous stability. I have grown fond of it. Sometimes I think that’s why it’s really open 24 hours, because it needs a time to be a cathedral. The housewives and the screaming kids leave and it gets to become what it truly is. Please be respectful, Michael. I know how laughable I am. I’d like to start in aisle six. That’s my favorite place, right between the Surf with Active Oxygen and the abrasive Tweety Bird heads. Before I start the tour, I’d like to point out some general characteristics. First, the gentle hum of the fluorescents. Notice how they’re not too bright, not blind- ing, don’t make you feel like a deer. The floors: earth tones, allowing one to avoid noticing the inevitable grime that accumulates on lighter shades of linoleum. The products: all faced. That’s an industry term, faced. It means they’re all even, symmetrical, soothing, not strewn chaotically all over our—all over the shelves. The music: Hall and Oates. Can’t win them all, I suppose. Still, it beats orchestrated string versions of “American Woman,” or an endless loop of early Whitney Houston singles. My point, Michael, is: I am well aware of the criticisms that you and others put forth, that my perfect little world here is in fact predictable and artificial, and inescapable, that it spreads its monocultural virus throughout the world, but I hold that these critics have not paid attention to the subtle, all-important differences that class and geography provide. When I go into the poor supermarket—the one down Route 33, with the limited produce selections and the gray meat and the dingy floors—I start to—I can’t breathe, it’s so—it’s horrible, I know, you would be—you must be so ashamed, I know that poor people need a place to shop too, but—well, I’m sure it’s not pleasant for them, either—the no-frills products? Have you seen these? Plain white boxes with the product names stamped on? BEANS. CORN CEREAL. It makes me so sad, so acutely aware of the fragility of human life. I

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From Orestes, a loose translation by Anne Washburn.

(Orestes and Pylades.)

Orestes: Take me through the plan now, every step. Pylades: We enter the house: “Now we go to kill ourselves.” Orestes: Excellent. And then what happens next. Pylades: We go to Helen: “Ah, we’re very unhappy.” Orestes: She weeps—but on the inside bubbles with delight. Pylades: As do we, my friend. Ah yes, as do we. Orestes: And then what next. How are we to kill her. Pylades: We carry swords. Concealed in our coats. Orestes: And we get rid of her attendants how? Pylades: We lock them all up into different rooms. Orestes: Yes and whoever won’t keep quiet we kill. Pylades: And after that: I think our task is clear. Orestes: Clear enough: the murder of Helen. Pylades: And this, this is the genius of the plan: to kill a better woman would be wrong, savagery but Helen we punish for all of Greece: for fathers slain, for brides made into widows, for parents bereft There will be shouts of joy. Burnt offerings will be sent to the Gods, the people will call down blessings on you. And after this day they will not call you Matricide, no, all that will be forgotten, you will have a better title: Orestes, slayer of Helen, the Killer of Men—it can’t be borne that Menelaus thrives while your father and you and your sister die; your mother—I’m going to leave that topic be— he gets his rotten wife back only from the work of Agamemnon’s spear and then he takes your throne and he leaves you to dangle in mid air. Let me die if I don’t kill her. And if the murder fails we take our torches, and we set this whole place on fire! Our rage will be famous. Our fury honored.

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From The Absence of Weather by Ken Urban.

(The hospital room of James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense under Harry S. Tru- man. May 1949, and the Recent Past, and the Distant Future, all at the same time. Winter. Midnight. Forrestal rests his head on the lap of his fellow patient.)

Patient: You won’t understand everything I say, but listen. Forrestal: Yes. Patient: A woman drives to the airport. The woman is married. She has a dog that she loves very much. The dog sits next to her in the car. The two drive to the airport where they will pick up the woman’s husband. The dog has brown hair, a dachshund. The woman is driving a 1997 Ford Taurus. A man drives a 1999 Ford Explorer or Blazer. He drives fast, much faster than the woman. He speeds up to cut in front of her car, to get in her lane, the one furthest to the left, leading to the airport terminal. She taps his bumper, but in a slight way, no scars on either his Ford Explorer (or Blazer), or on her Ford Taurus. He stops his vehicle. She stops hers. He gets out of the car. He is screaming at her. Various obscenities from a young man’s face, red and with hair growing from its chin. She rolls down her window. He keeps yelling. First, the dog barks. (He remembers how another man used to yell like this at her.) Then the dachshund jumps on her lap. (She loves this dog like it was her child, the one she couldn’t have after six years of fertility drugs, her first husband leaving her when the drugs failed.) Her dog is on her lap the man is yelling at her the window is down the man grabs the dog. He hurls the dog into the busy street. The woman screams and she gets out of her car and the dachshund is confused and it walks toward her voice and it is struck by a car and it is struck by another car and it is struck by another car and it is struck by another car The woman watches. The bloody animal is in her arms.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2006.28.3.11 by guest on 28 September 2021 Poppy dies at a veterinarian’s office. The man drives away He is never found His Ford Explorer (or Blazer) has Virginia license plates and on the car’s floor was a prescription pill bottle that rolled way beneath the passenger side seat and could not be found by the man when he frantically tried to scavenge for it. Who do you identify with Forrestal? The woman who by no fault of her own was bereaved? The man driven by anger when he lacked the chemical he needed? The dog loyal to his owner and then snatched away for good?

(Forrestal is weeping.)

Forrestal: That’s easy, my friend. The second husband left waiting at the airport, wondering, as he stood by his luggage, where his first wife could be. Patient: The one history forgot. Forrestal: The one history will forget. Patient: There is a shopping center, a business complex, an aircraft carrier, and a school all named after you. Forrestal: (Laughs.) You’re a mean bastard, you know that?

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