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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. 12 PAJ 84 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 of the 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. URBAN / Contemporary American Playwriting 13 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.

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