“Why Not Us?”: Lisa Kron on 9/11 and In the Wake by Julie Haverkate

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 2014

Back in March, TCG published In the Wake by the Obie award-winning playwright of 2.5 Minutes and the book writer for the recent hit musical, Fun Home. In her newest published work, Lisa Kron takes on the big question of our country’s character with Ellen, a political junkie, who on the Thanksgiving following the controversial 2000 election, discovers that ideas about America and our own selves are not as fixed as they once seemed. Lisa was kind enough to take a few moments to discuss her new book.

Julie Haverkate: In the Wake is set against the backdrop of the Bush years – the 2000 election, 9/11. What specifically inspired you to write the play?

Lisa: I started work on In the Wake shortly after George Bush’s re-election in 2004. Good lefty that I am, I had responded to his policies with revulsion and had been appalled by the right’s outright and implied assertion of American exceptionalism as moral justification for that administration’s actions. Then, after 9/11, I was taken aback by the question, which I heard as often on the left as on the right: “Why us?” “Why not us?” I thought. Why should we be exempted from the kind of random tragedy that happens to people everywhere all the time? Then a few things happened in my life and I realized that I too assumed, at least on a personal level, that my life was meant to be calm, secure and stable. I too assumed that, though I might go through a rocky time, I would inevitably return to equilibrium. And then I wondered why I, a thinking person of the left who knows better, would make such an assumption. What else was I, along with my community on the left, taking for granted?

Julie: Is that what Ellen’s character embodies for you?

Lisa: I wrote the character of Ellen as an exploration of this question. I wrote her as allegory for that aspect of American character that assumes that if we are earnest, thoughtful, well-meaning, diligent and good we will weather adversity and inevitably emerge intact on the other side, that with enough courage and willingness to grow, we can expand indefinitely, and thus avoid true sacrifice or irreparable loss.

Julie: If we were to drop in on Ellen today, a decade later, how do you think she would have changed–or wouldn’t she have?

Lisa: I can’t say how Ellen would have changed in the past decade. If I were writing about the political situation now, I’d write a different play with different characters. But I will say that, though there are certainly things I would change if I could go back in time with my 20/20 hindsight, I do think Ellen’s argument still holds: that decades of conservative systemic reorganization are far more impactful and consequential than the election of even the most brilliant and dazzling president can possibly be.

Lisa Kron’s plays include Fun Home, a musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, written with composer Jeanine Tesori; The Ver**zon Play; Well; 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Most Humiliating Stories. Her honors include playwriting fellowships from the Lortel and Guggenheim foundations, the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, the Lark Play Development Center, the American Voices New Play Institute and the MacDowell Colony, as well as the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts from CalArts, a Helen Merrill Award and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a founding member of the OBIE- and Bessie-Award-winning collaborative theater company The Five Lesbian Brothers. She serves on the board of the MacDowell Colony and the Council of the Dramatists Guild of America.

Intersecting Lives, One Hallway: Adam Rapp on extending moments and digging deep by Julie Haverkate

TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 2014

Back in January, TCG published The Hallway Trilogy, a harrowing collection of plays by Adam Rapp that premiered, in rep, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in 2011. The plays – Rose, Paraffin and Nursing – weave tales of love, torment and redemption in one Lower East Side tenement hallway over the course of a century.

Ever busy – the playwright-author-director just premiered Loitering with Intent, a film he directed, starring Marisa Tomei, Sam Rockwell and Natasha Lyonne, at Tribeca Film Festival last week – Adam was kind enough to take a few moments to discuss his new book.

Julie Haverkate: Can you talk a little bit about the title – The Hallway Trilogy – and why you chose to set the three plays in a single hallway?

Adam: I’ve lived in the same East Village apartment for over twenty years and one day, as I was walking up the four flights of stairs to my place, I was struck by the notion that in this very minor way I’d intersected with so many lives. There are only seven units in my building, and yet running into fellow tenants at the mailboxes and on the way up and down the stairs is this consistent narrative slipstream of formalities. But there’s always something lurking beneath the pleasantry. What’s registering on her face? Is she happy? Haunted? Indifferent? Has that couple just had sex? Did the man below me in unit 4 just leave someone?

Julie: What does this physical space, and its transformation across a century, mean to you?

Adam: I thought setting a series of plays in one of these transitional spaces would be an exciting challenge: How to extend moments and dig deep with story and character. How to embrace the limitations of a non-descript, narrow space. And how to make a play feel inevitable. I was also interested in how the actual hallway would change over the course of a century. The doors and the analog public payphone and the light sources and the texture of the walls. And what doesn’t change? What’s forgotten? Which lives have haunted a building and which ones simply fade away?

Julie: Clearly there’s a lot to be gained from seeing the shows in rep, but could these plays be produced singly?

Adam: I think the plays could be produced singly, but creating an acting matrix and a hundred years of history and figuring out how to get the thing up and running is sort of a little theatre miracle. At least it was when we did it at Rattlestick. And I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to take that kind of risk. It’s so fulfilling for an ensemble, and though it was difficult, I think our audiences appreciated the rigor and its rewards.

Adam Rapp is a novelist, filmmaker and an Obie Award-winning playwright and director. His plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Light Winter, Nocturne, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Finer Noble Gases, Essential Self- Defense and more. He is the author of many young adult novels such as Punkzilla, The Buffalo Tree and Under the Dog, and he is the writer director of the film Winter Passing, starring Zooey Deschanel, Will Ferrell and Ed Harris.

Melissa James Gibson: On Spaces and Bodies, and the Movement In Between by Julie Haverkate

THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 2014

Back in July, TCG published Melissa James Gibson’s This and Other Plays. The debut collection by the Obie Award-winning playwright includes This, an un-romantic comedy about a group of friends; Suitcase, an anxious verbal quartet about stalled dissertations and improbable romantics; [sic], in which three, young urban-failures navigate the slippery allegiances of their triangular friendship and Brooklyn Bridge, about a latchkey kid who embarks on a journey through both the architecture of her building and the nature of kindness.

The playwright was kind enough to share a few thoughts on her first collection of plays.

Julie Haverkate: Your plays often take place in transitional spaces: doorways, stairwells, hallways, fire escapes. What is it about these spaces that intrigue?

Melissa: I’ve always been drawn to cuspy locales, places that are essentially thresholds between public and private. They’re dynamic, as they’re often sites of negotiation, where people cut to the conversational chase as they’re in transit. In each of the collected plays, a lot of requests, explicit or not, are made and responded to in transitional spaces: feed me, love me, befriend me, help me, lend me money, ease my pain, etc. They’re sort of like conduit architecture, these locations, and, in terms of human interaction, they brim with every sort of possibility.

Julie: Regarding that “conduit architecture”: Do you have any background in design, and if so, how does that inform your writing and your relationships with production designers?

Melissa: I don’t have any formal background in design, but when I was in grad school at Yale as a playwright I had the privilege of sitting in on Ming Cho Lee’s first-year design class. It was an all-day Saturday class taken by design students in each discipline — sets, lighting, costume, sound — as well as first-year directors. Ming’s generous, humane and exacting approach really opened up my mind about the role of design in realizing a play on the stage. I became interested in more fully articulating the physical landscape of my plays on the page. As playwrights we’re often taught to focus exclusively on the dialogue, but the spaces and how the bodies move within the spaces inevitably inform the words and vice versa. I’ve found that the more I articulate my vision about the physical world of the play, the more designers are given license to be bold and inventive in meeting the needs of the script. And I love to be involved in the design process for inaugural productions. Great designers are inevitably great dramaturgs, and I learn so much about my plays by thinking them through with designers.

Melissa James Gibson’s plays include Current Nobody, Given Fish and What Rhymes with America. She has received many honors include a Kesselring Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Writers’ Award and a Steinberg Playwright Award. She wrote the screenplay for Almost Christmas, which premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, and is a writer for the FX series The Americans.

Sarah Ruhl on adaptations and delving into the minds of masters Chekhov and Woolf by Julie Haverkate

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, 2013

Later this month, TCG will publish Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl’s Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf’s Orlando, a pairing of adaptations: Anton Chekhov’s classic of ennui and frustration and Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending, period-hopping novel.

Sarah will be at Vassar College on April 10 to read her recent work: a series of micro-essays about theatre-making, being a mother, Eurydice and poetry.

In the meantime, the playwright was kind enough to share a few thoughts on her new book.

Julie Haverkate: In the intro, you state, “Both of the following adaptations are nothing if not faithful. (I see no reason to do an adaptation unless you assume the original is better than you could ever make it...)” Can you explain more about the impetus to adapt these works that you feel such reverence for? Did you feel any hesitance about doing so?

Sarah: The impetus in both cases came from an external source: Ed Stern asked me to do Three Sisters, and Joyce Piven asked me to do Orlando. In the case of Orlando, I was lucky that I was too young to feel as much fear as I perhaps should have felt. I was only twenty-two, and, happily, I just went at it. In the case of Three Sisters, there was some degree of trepidation, but it was ameliorated by having the amazing Elise Thoron at my side helping me with the Russian.

Julie: Can you tell us a little bit more about these commissions?

Sarah: Ed Stern was artistic director of Cincinnatti Playhouse in the Park, and he was set to do Three Sisters with [director] John Doyle. Joyce Piven is artistic director of Piven Theatre Workshop [in IL], and I’ve known her since I was 12 or so; Orlando was my first professional commission, outside of college, and it was extraordinary that she trusted me with it. They went into production, and later I did another production of Orlando at the Actors’ Gang [in L.A.] with Joyce, and then at CSC in New York with director Rebecca Taichman, where I did revisions. Three Sisters went on to be done at Yale Rep and Berkeley Rep with Les Waters directing. I didn’t re-work Three Sisters textually, but the productions were very different.

Julie: What did you find most compelling or rewarding about adapting these two works? Are you interested in adapting anything else?

Sarah: I loved getting into the mind and world of Woolf and Chekhov. I loved doing translation work because it felt almost mathematical, like a puzzle. I’d love to do The Seagull too. I’d love to adapt some Katherine Mansfield (a New Zealand writer who I love; Woolf said Mansfield was the only writer she was ever jealous of).

Julie: What does “adaptation” mean to you? Given your interest in being faithful to the original text (and in regards to Three Sisters), how does an adaptation differ from a translation?

Sarah: I think of Three Sisters as a translation rather than an adaptation; I call Orlando an adaptation because I added dialogue and changed things a bit structurally to make it work for the stage. But Three Sisters has no such “adaptation” elements; I simply wanted to make the text sing in English.

Sarah Ruhl’s other plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) and The Clean House, as well as Passion Play, Dean Man’s Cell Phone, Demeter in the City, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, Late: a cowboy song and Stage Kiss. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her plays have premiered on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in many theatres around the world.