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[NOTE: This interview is copyrighted 2008 and cannot be
published or used in any way without written permission from
Don Shewey.]
He arrived at my house heavily laden with two gymbag-like duffels stuffed with who-knows-what and another bag. He was wearing an overcoat and scarf and pullover sweater on top of another shirt, trousers, black shoes. He sat with me in my leather swivels, drank some Lapsang Souchong tea. I noticed at some point that he was clutching in his hand what looked like the screw-top from a bottle of Perrier or something, which he seemed to have
had in his hand the whole time. He spoke in his usual careful and deliberate way.
I started by telling him how much I appreciated his performance of
The Fever under Scott Elliott’s direction.
WS: Scott is a very very unsentimental person. Self-indulgence, or the self-love of the writer, is almost physically nauseating to him, really. So he …during the rehearsals he said more than once, “Oh, I can see that you’re particularly in love with that particular phrase that you wrote.” It was a pretty harsh comment.
(DS: You felt that to mean you should not be in love with that phrase.)
No, he thought that the audience didn’t care about the writing or who wrote it. The audience wanted to hear the story that the man was telling. And I was really entrusted with playing a character who had a particular story to tell. Not that the character had to have bizarre external features that I don’t have. He didn’t have to have a strange accent or strange mannerisms that would be alien to me. But it was not about me. So I sort of eliminated the person that I play every day from the play, to a certain extent. Which sped me up. Because when I’m me, I’m rather slow. But when I was not me, the reasons that I’m slow seemed to disappear suddenly, and it got very fast.
(That was very different from your previous experience of performing the play.)
Well, it was 15 minutes shorter.
(I can’t remember whether you worked with a director before…)
No. When I did it the first time, I was not thinking of it really as theater.
(You had a whole other way of understanding the piece.)
Yes. I did not have a director. We’ll never know whether maybe more people would have appreciated it if I’d had a director. I’ve always thought it was a mistake that I hadn’t had one. Not at the time, but looking back on it.
(At the time, you didn’t think of it as theater, even when you were doing it at the Public?)
I really didn’t. I sort of thought, I’m using these theaters as a place where a group of people can gather and hear a guy talking. And indeed the piece of writing is written in the form of a play, because it’s the story of a character. But in my mind it was more like something else, like a harangue on the street corner written in the form of a play and that was conveniently done in a theater. But it had some non-theatrical elements, including the fact that I didn’t get any money for doing it and I got all the theaters to have an incredibly cheap ticket and there were no stage managers, I turned on the lights myself.
(You took no payment for performing at the Public?)
No. but I also didn’t sign a contract with Joe Papp.
(You didn’t make any money but he didn’t make any money either.)
Correct.
(So you saw the piece then as some combination of lecture, reading, soapbox harangue. And it was very different when you did it at the New Group.)
Yeah, at the New Group, we were really doing it as a play.
(And you changed the text substantially.)
Yes, I changed the text quite a bit.
(Did you do that just in rehearsal for that production, or had you been revising it all along?)
No, I did it in rehearsal for that production, and I might not have done it if somebody other than me had been performing it. But there I was. It is quite relevant to today, and I didn’t particularly want to start off the whole thing by talking about someone in an electric chair because that’s not used anymore so it would be immediately saying, “Relax, friends, this is not going to be about us, it’s about people in the past.” That didn’t seem right. So I played around with it.
(Of course because you were inhabiting it in interaction with an audience, that’s a whole other way of experiencing the play. Hearing about someone else doing it you wouldn’t have had those thoughts.)
Right. I mean, I have had those thoughts. But of course it is in certain ways of a period. You know, it fits snugly in that period. But it’s pretty relevant to today’s period, it just has a different…it comes off differently.
(The piece itself has a political/social content no matter how it’s done. But the styles of theater of the two productions were so different. And the performance by you was so different.)
Yes. In the earlier one…anybody could say what they think about my acting, but it’s a fact that I didn’t go to RADA or really do the things actors do, or that I would have done if I’d known I was going to be a professional actor, and so the last time even in small venues, I did shout, which was just to be heard. But it’s sort of antithetical to the piece. It’s quite wrong to shout because a great deal of it is just meant to be thought. So in this case, Bruce Odland provided the incredible sound system, and most of the time I was mumbling. Not mumbling but speaking very very quietly so that it did seem like thought. And then every once in a while, it was much more outward-directed, and I would tell the story to the people in the room.
(I experienced the New Group production, on one level, as very much about voice – the voice of the writer but also your voice and the way you used your voice, it was almost like a Beckett play – the way the voice was produced made a big impact on what we were understanding.)
It was clarifying in a way because you could sort of tell which parts were the person thinking things out for himself and struggling with himself, and which parts were in a way quite confident narrative to the audience. And then Jennifer Tipton was lighting it, in synch with the changes in sound, so Scott and Jennifer and Bruce all did this together in a coordinated way. So it was quite theatrical.
(Yeah, in a funny way that the production you did at the Public Theater was very Brechtian, no machinery. This was different, not a Brechtian style production. But the Beckettian focus on voice. But more or less the same text. I’m so impressed with the malleability of this text and the different ways it can manifest. Two things I want to ask you about that. One thing that fascinated me was that it showed your development of your voice as an actor, which has become a major asset to you in all these movies where you’ve been playing characters just through your voice. That’s one thing that happened between the two different productions of
The Fever.)
That’s true. That’s absolutely right. Yes, I became a dinosaur.
(You’ve inhabited many species!)
I’ve played many different types of creatures and animals. A man came to see me doing
The Fever in San Francisco, and after I did the performance the man came up to me and gave me an enormous plastic dinosaur, and he said I want you to play this dinosaur in a movie. I was quite disoriented, being involved with
The Fever…
(This was when you first did it?)
Yeah, this would have been in, maybe, 1990, 1991. And it was John Lassiter, who had invented the concept of
Toy Story. That was very strange.
(Not the response to the play you imagined when you were sitting in your room writing it for five years…)
I was so puzzled by this man. Yes, it changed my life.
(So even if you didn’t go to RADA, you’ve now had tremendous experience acting in plays and movies.)
Oh, I’ve had a lot of experience. I’ve certainly been directed by, you know, an astounding number of directors.
(I looked you up on IMDB – you’ve been in 114 movies or TV shows, and many that I hadn’t heard of. That’s a lot!)
That is a lot.
(With The Fever, the other thing that was remarkable to me was that the very ending was quite different from the first time you did the play. I had remembered through the years, I could hear you saying the last sentences the first time around, and I was astonished when they weren’t the last sentences of the play when you did it at The New Group.)
Yeah, I changed it throughout, because I had had, you know, an awful lot of years of seeing other people do it, and I’ve thought about it, and also people have talked to me about it, and there were things that a lot of people didn’t understand. So this was my chance to clarify them.
(What kind of things did people not understand?)
Well, some things were, you know, there’s one part of the play that gets almost into the field of economics. And at one point I sort of say that if certain performances of opera occur, then certain other types of economic activity on that day won’t be happening and people might die as a result of that. Quite a lot of people have criticized that passage in the way it was originally written. They tried to show that I was wrong, when I’m obviously right. So that is an example of something that I rewrote a few million times to try to nail it in such a way that no one would fail to be convinced by what I was saying.
Very near the end of the play, I asked the audience to forgive me. Which I honestly meant in the same way that in Elizabethan plays, the actors at the end say something like, well, I hope this play hasn’t been too bad, or I hope you’ve enjoyed it, or I hope you haven’t been bored by it, thank you for indulging me in listening to it. But a lot of people, because the subject of the play is responsibility and the involvement of the better-off people in the oppression of the poor, a lot of people thought I was saying forgive me for everything I’ve done, which in a way would have been so shallow that it would have meant forgive me for everything I’ve done because I’m going to go on doing it. And, you know, forgive me for the things I’m going to do in the future, too. Which wasn’t what I meant. But I knew a lot of people didn’t get it. So that’s another example. I took that out.
(Because it felt like letting the character off the hook?)
I didn’t mean that. The way people were taking it, it was sentimental, it was as if I was pitifully asking, and they would not be the ones who would be forgiving me anyway. It was sort of stupid the way it was being interpreted. I was asking the whole universe to forgive me for everything I’d ever done, which would be both sentimental and mindless, so I don’t know, it was not at all what I had in mind.
(The way I’d always taken it was that it was a representation of how we forgive ourselves as a way of not taking responsibility. A kind of blindness that we live. I took the play to be showing us our blindness in wanting … allow me to go along with my self-delusion.)
Right. That’s exactly what I didn’t want. I think I changed the entire ending. Because a lot of people took it to mean … well, because I make fun of the concept of quote-unquote gradual change, and I make fun of the small things that people think will make a difference. I say no they won’t make a difference. And so a lot of people, particularly those who would think of themselves as liberals but wouldn’t know much about left-wing thinking, they took it to mean, oh, well, he’s saying that all the things I believe in won’t change the condition of the poor, so he’s basically saying nothing will ever change and don’t even worry about it. Change is impossible. Whereas I meant for people to understand that the small things aren’t enough, there should be big things. The situation is unbearable and intolerable and it has to change, and anything we can think of to make it change … we’re looking for ways to make a huge change, and I’m in favor of being an activist. I sort of assumed that people would take that for granted. Quite a few people didn’t. So I sort of made it more clear that the character was confused, and at the end the character doesn’t really know what he’s going to do. He doesn’t know whether he’s going to change in any way at all or if this was just a night when he had a fever and he had a lot of strange thoughts. But at least the possibility should be raised that he might change. Either radically, or a little bit. He’s thinking wildly at the end, well, gee, maybe I’ll devote my whole life to trying to change the world and get thrown in jail fro it. Or even shot, you know. On the other hand, maybe I won’t change my whole life and I won’t go to jail, but I’ll march in the demonstration, which ten years ago I would have never done. That would be like me, personally, because, you know, I, uh, I, you know, never marched in a demonstration until I was in my fifties.
(So with The Fever, and particularly at the end, you’re wanting the audience NOT to distance themselves from this character. To follow him and be with him in his self-questioning, is that right?)
Yes. The character, I mean, the way the form of the play is that the character is attacking himself and demolishing all of his self-defenses and the flattering illusions that he has about himself. But if a member of the audience is ready to go there, a lot of what I’m saying about myself as the character is true of them, and so, you know, in an ideal world they might be struck by the things being said and wonder whether they are part of the problem or part of the solution, as they used to say.
(And still do, sometimes.)
Yeah, I mean, it’s basically, it’s quite, it has some pretty rough questions for anybody who’s willing to listen to it. And there are a handful of people who are already devoting their lives to change in the world. They don’t have that much to worry about from my play. And quite a few of them came to the play, people who are really activists. But those who are mostly just consuming the oil that George Bush has brought to us through violence, those people should be somewhat worried by the questions raised in the play.
(What was the response of the activists who came to see the play?)
That was nice for me. Mostly … I mean, a lot of people figured these things out when they were teenagers. I didn’t, because I had a lot of armor that had to be dismantled. But, you know, a lot of people who do great things in the world and struggle to make things better figured certain things out when they were kids. I mean, the big … it’s not even a matter of … I mean, I was always a liberal, and I grew up around liberals and people who thought there were terrible problems in the world and that people should take steps to make the world better. It’s just the degree of urgency in that concern that separates the liberal from the radical. The liberal has a feeling that it can all be discussed in a very urbane, civilized way, and over time bit by bit things can be changed. The radical feels the anguish of people on the bottom too keenly for that and feels that change should have happened a long time ago and immediately isn’t soon enough.
(So I’m curious, and we’re all curious, where you’re going in your next play. I understand you have a new play and I’m curious what you’re willing to say about it.)
Uh, oh, I don’t want to say much about it, but I’ll just say that, yeah, I’ve been working on a new play for ten years, I’ve finally finished it, and I’ll even say what it’s called, which takes nerve on my part, cuz it’s all been secret for ten years from everybody on earth, but anyway it’s called
Grasses of a Thousand Colors. And, um, uh, I’m not going to say anything about it except that people, it’s been my practice at any rate up until now, I have really, uh, trusted my own instincts, uh, and I’ve felt, uhh, that, um, you know, I have my function in life, if I have one, it would be as some kind of, well, when I was a kid I knew a man from Czechoslovakia who had a passport that described him…I mean, I think he got this during the war, the passport described his profession as a “literary writer,” which I always thought was fascinating. Other people I suppose were technical writers, maybe there were many different categories, but I’ve always thought that probably the best use of my talent would be as a literary writer.
So it’s, uh, you know, it would be a fantastic thing to have an impact on some specific problem in society, and I have absolutely no idea whether I could. Maybe if I said to myself, I’m going to write a play about capital punishment, and I want that play to have an influence on the debate about capital punishment in this country. I just don’t know if I would have that ability or not. But I’ve sort of decided I’m not going to organize my life that way. And I’m going to sort of follow this strange, somewhat old-fashioned belief in the idea of inspiration and that your subject picks you. You don’t pick the subject. And when I started writing I had no clear political opinions. Now I have some, but I’m still sort of decided that up until now at any rate I have stuck with the idea of seeing what happens.
(Both The Fever and The Designated Mourner reflect that. They’re not ignorant of or in denial about political realities, and yet they’re written with a literary intention or perspective, a literary point of view. Not trying to persuade, to get anybody to agree or believe something.)
Well, I think The Fever tries to get people to believe, to convince. I think it is an attempt to convince. I mean, it wouldn’t convince a Republican to become more left-wing. But it might convince a Democrat or a liberal to become more left-wing if they took it on seriously and brooded on it and if I wrote it well. That one is really a kind of attempt to convince. But it wasn’t written that way on purpose. It started off, I didn’t even know I was going to be writing on such subjects. It was written as an art object like everything else I’ve written. And yet it went that way, and I went with it.
(Did the new play surprise you where it took you?)
Yes. Yes. I’ll only say that. Yes, it’s certainly not something that I would have planned or that anyone could plan. It’s just the way it turned out.
(Is there a timetable of when it’s going to be produced or where?)
Well, I’m just going to say, because otherwise this could ruin it, our interview. I’m just going to say I’m in high-level discussion with top world leaders, and in due course there will be … the plans will be revealed. It won’t be done in 2008, that’s for sure. I think it’ll happen in 2009.
(NY or London?)
I’m too frightened to say. I have … everybody knows the realities in New York. There’s one important review per play, and in London there are eight. Now which sounds more welcoming, you know? If the choice were one review or eight reviews, y’know, there’s something very attractive about the idea of getting eight reviews because, y’know, there could well be some people who like you. AND…in New York the one review is actually more influential than all eight combined in England. People in New York are, uh, in their decisions about theater, they’re more guided by criticism than I think a lot of people in England are, because, uh, um, people go to more plays over there. The other thing is that, it’s, uh, of course here the goal is, for me at any rate, to try to convince people who don’t go to plays to go to my plays. And that’s hard to do. That’s very hard to do. Most people who go to plays are people who love theater, which means people who love theater the way it is right now, which in a way doesn’t include me.
I wouldn’t really say that I’m someone who loves theater the way it is right now.
(But when you go to the theater, you go with a hope that it’ll be different from the status quo or something that appeals to you, right?)
Well, I have two identities, really, as a theatergoer. I mean, as a, if I’m going in a way as the guy who writes the plays, I’m somewhere between critical and appalled by most of what I might see. But the reality is that I’m also, I have the theater gene. I really like going to plays. And I really love watching actors. And in a certain way I actually enjoy probably a higher proportion of what I see than most people because I tend to … if there are five people onstage and one of them is giving a wonderful performance, in my opinion, I’m pretty happy, and I’m looking at the one who in my opinion is giving the wonderful performance and I’m really enjoying the evening.
(So it’s sort of the writer in you and the actor in you, the connoisseur of writers vs. the connoisseur of actors – those are two different people who co-exist and have very different responses to what you see, is that what you mean?)
I wouldn’t put it that clearly. If I were to write an article in which I would discuss an entire season in New York, I would probably feel that the institution of theater as a whole was not offering what I wish it would be offering. And I think that a lot of it is not very, how do I say this, the choices made are not necessarily that clever. And so I know all too many people who came to New York with the high hope of going to a lot of theater, they went to 3 or 4 things, and they thought, “Well, these are rather stupid, and I don’t have time to watch them. So I’m not going to go to any more plays.” On the other hand, if I myself go to the theater, I frequently enjoy the texts in some way. And even if I don’t enjoy the texts, I enjoy some of the actors. I enjoy sitting in the theater and watching a play. So that’s my particular … I’m one of those people who has that theater gene. There’s no question about it. I do have it. And if you said to me, “You’re going to go to a play tonight – actually, it’s not a very good play,” I’d still sort of be looking forward to it. I’d be thinking, oh good, I’m going to a play tonight, that’ll be really fun…even though I might trust you and yeah, it’s not going to be that great.
The problem for me as an audience, or the problem for me as a writer is that, see, I’m not saying I’m a good writer or a bad writer, but to even possibly enjoy what I do, or get something out of it, definitely requires some kind of very lively …in order to benefit from seeing one of my plays, or in order to enjoy it, there has to be a very active engagement on the part of the audience member. So you’ve gotta be looking at the play with sort of active intelligence that you would apply if you were, let’s say, going to a concert of classical music, you have to listen to it, you have to actively engage in it and follow it or you won’t really get much out of it. You can’t just sort of lie there half-asleep. It won’t affect you.
Well, if the plays are mostly not very good and the more demanding members of the audience give up on theater, and you have an audience that is not very demanding, a lot of those people will be rather passive. They won’t be giving to the evening what needs to be given, if people aren’t meeting you halfway, so they don’t like it. So they just think, well, he’s not a very good writer. And maybe they’re right, but that’s not the point. The point is, you couldn’t even begin to like it if you’re just sitting there as a blob. So, you know, I’d like to get some of those people who gave up a long time ago to come see my plays, and that’s hard to do. Very hard to find those people and get them to come, cuz they really don’t want to come. I mean, they don’t read the theater page, and they’re looking at that just the way I don’t read the wrestling page. There could be wrestling of an incredibly high caliber going on but I wouldn’t know because I don’t hear about it, I don’t think about it, it’s not on my screen.
(You never search for wrestling on YouTube, Wally? No, I love what you’re saying about how you would like an audience to interact with your work, and I’m curious to know what the impact has been of Scott Elliott taking an interest in your work and producing several of your plays and pulling you into the New Group orbit. Tell me about that.)
Well, it’s changed my life, really, that this one individual has decided that he’s interested in my writing. It’s a very, it’s quite surprising. In other words, the American theater – there are thousands of people involved in it, many of them reading the magazine that we’re talking for. But I don’t have anything to do with the American theater. I am only involved in a weird, avant-garde thing that Andre Gregory and I do, which is not really part of the mainstream of American theater. Scott Elliott is actually a significant leader in the American theater, in the center of it all really, if you want to look at it that way, even though by temperament he’s an angry young man or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what made him take an interest in me, and I would never want to know. I wouldn’t ask him. But it’s given me a feeling of, uh, well, I’ve derived enormous energy, strength, and pleasure from the fact of his enthusiasm and the fact that he’s put on so much of my work. And he’s courageously, you know, stuck with me even though he’s been slapped down for it. He’s gotten more punishment than reward for his association with me, and yet he’s stuck with me and he’s still very very committed to me.
He is also an inspired director. He has the gift. He has that very very specific talent for theatrical combustion. For doing things that live on the stage.
(I think of even the way he did Aunt Dan and Lemon, how unsettling it was to come into the theater and there is Lili Taylor sitting on stage looking at you, very intently and very alive from the moment you walked in. It was a very different experience of that play than I remembered from before. So I’m wondering if in the context of The New Group and the kind of plays that Scott produces there creates the relationship with the audience that you dream of, or not necessarily.)
Well, I think that he has definitely created a group of people who know that they certainly will not be snoozing when they go to his theater, so there are none of those snoozing people. They really don’t go there. And that’s, uh, a wonderful thing. But you know, to bring everybody that I would like to come is terribly terribly terribly hard. They’re in New York City.
(Who would you like to come?)
Well, for instance, I remember an evening that I went to, and I’d seen some plays around this same time, before and after, and then one night I went to a reading, where Naomi Klein was launching her book, uh, uh, the Shock, what is it called,
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, The Shock Doctrine. This was a reading that she gave at the Society for Ethical Culture. Well, it was an auditorium, people were sitting in seats, looking at the stage. But the brains were on fire, what can I say? The people in the audience were not just meeting Naomi Klein halfway, they were … it was like hungry dogs being thrown meat by Naomi Klein. They were leaning forward so far they were practically on the stage. And they were responding to every word that she said. And they were just very very very alive. And you sort of thought, Oh, well, couldn’t these people, couldn’t I stand up and say, hey, I’m doing a play tomorrow, why don’t you all come to it tomorrow, I’ll give you free tickets. Yeah, cuz, I can tell you, a lot of the people who were there, I’m going to bet that they go to between zero and one play a year, closer to zero. Of course a lot of the people there were rather young. And there’s a physical restlessness related to being young and an intellectual restlessness. It’s not unrelated to the way old, old people feel, which is: is this worth my time, because I don’t have that much time. Which is a good standard. I mean…
I mean, putting it differently, uh, if you go, I mean, every night in New York City, not every night, but almost every night in NYC incredible classical music is being played. Now, if you go to hear, let’s say, a concert of, I don’t know, Beethoven and Schoenberg, there’s so much content in the course of an hour and a half. I mean, there’s a lot going on that you experience there. How many plays offer as much to you in an hour and a half? What kind of people would rather go to the play, which offers, you know, like, I don’t know, three sprigs of broccoli, rather than the concert, which is offering a banquet?
(Well, there’s what’s offered and there’s what’s eaten. I don’t know if everybody who goes to a concert at Carnegie Hall experiences the richness of the content that you might. I think a lot of people sleep through classical music concerts.)
They may, but that totally mystifies me. Why would they go? But you’re right. You see people there who seem to be half-asleep. That to me is a bigger mystery to me than why they would go to a play. A play at least you see members of your own species doing things that remind you of your own life. If you go to Beethoven and you don’t like Beethoven, you get nothing. I don’t know why they go.
(I’m glad that TCG is publishing these two plays – is there a name to the anthology?)
No, it’s just Our Late Night and A Thought in Three Parts.
(Which are two plays that are hardly ever performed.)
Well, Our Late Night has been around now for, let’s see, 35 years, and I guess it’s had, I think, 4 performances in the history of its life. Four productions.
(That’s two more than I know of.)
Ah, A Thought in Three Parts has been done twice in England, but in this country it was done as a workshop by Joe Papp but never opened. But in the … I mean, the American premiere took place last year in Austin. The Rubber Repertory Company did an unbelievably beautiful production of the play and I hope they’ll bring it to New York. And I would love if there were to be a picture of the Rubber Repertory Company with this article, because it was absolutely fabulous and they want to come to NY and do it and I want them to. In some strange way. It was wonderful. They’re a fantastic company. I mean, they had done
The Fever and they’d done The Designated
Mourner. And it’s run by these two guys. They came to NY, they saw
The Music Teacher, and they came up to me at The Music Teacher
and they said, “We want to do A Thought in Three
Parts." And I said, “Well, you want to do it, but I don’t think you’ll really do it, because nobody’s ever really done it. Why would
you do it?” Lo and behold, I got a message they were actually doing it. So I went to Texas and saw it. They did it, and the audience totally gobbled it up, because they were, they identified with it from the first minute. They were into it. It was beautifully directed, beautifully acted. It was…and you know, in a way, I’m bitter, angry, whatever. On the other hand, I’m incredibly, when something like that happens, I’m unbelievably humbled. It’s mind-boggling really. Because nobody made them do it. I didn’t convince them to do it. They didn’t know me. They just read these words on a page and said we’d like to do this.
(I hope it comes to NY. I’m dying to see it.)
We’re looking for different possibilities of how it could be done here, and I’m very very determined that it must be. I’m not forcing it to come. They said to me…because it was the toast of Austin, it was incredibly popular. Then a wonderful man who lives in Marfa, TX, said, I want to bring you all to do the play in Marfa, and they did. And it was the toast of Marfa.
(Marfa is its own context, too. Didn’t they do the play in Australia too?)
No, they did The Designated Mourner, not A Thought in Three
Parts.
(Has DM been done a lot?)
Oh no, practically not at all.
(But several productions…Australia, Austin…others?)
Well, it’s been done in other countries. It’s been done in Hamburg, Germany, it was done in Mexico, which was wonderful. Sweden, I saw it in Stockholm, which was fabulous.
(Again I would imagine they were vastly different styles, like the difference between David Hare’s production and Andre Gregory’s were mind-boggling.)
Huge differences. Huge differences. Greece, wonderful production in Greece. Y’know, so it’s, no, I feel I’m somewhat, I have, I’m a very lucky guy really. But no, in the United States it’s been done at Steppenwolf, and let’s say the regional theaters did not clamor to do
The Designated Mourner.
(DM is difficult. To do it really well is difficult.)
It is difficult.
(I always thought Our Late Night is a play that would be ideal for Steppenwolf and/or the New Group to do.)
Well, Steppenwolf did OLN in 1975, when John Malkovich was 19. But I couldn’t afford to go and see it, and everybody warned me that it was gonna be a terrible experience if I did go. Of course now I think I was insane. I should have borrowed or stolen money or done anything to see it. But somehow it didn’t happen.
(Has Scott considered doing the play?)
I don’t know. You’d have to ask him. It’s a strange play. Yes, if I were a director, I would think it’s rather enticing. Cuz … well, you know that Caryl Churchill directed it in England. The Royal Court had a strange kind of idea briefly where they asked a group of people to direct things…
(Artist’s choice.)
So that was wonderful, a thrilling production. It’s quite lively. But you know, I’m not the guy they ask about why they don’t do my work.
(This is the first time it’s being published as a book. Has it been available in a Dramatists Play Service edition?)
No. Right now is the first time they’re widely available.
(I just want to ask you if there’s anything more you want to say about
Grasses of A Thousand Colors – how many characters are in it, or what it’s in general about…)
Four characters. Just say high-level plans are being made, and prominent world leaders will announce the whole thing when it’s official.
No, I was going to say that one thing that is happening to me that I would love the readers to know that the CD of
The Music Teacher will be available by time this article comes out. The CD is on Bridge Records. It has, you know, it’s a CD, it doesn’t have the long monologue and dialogue passages, it’s the musical. It’s the sung part, with many of the same singers.
(I only found out last night that The Fever is out on CD.)
The Fever does exist … (he seems to indicate that he doesn’t like
it) It’s quite a good car tape, I’ve been told.
(DM is available, The Fever is available in the Vanessa Redgrave version, so you’re in all these other media. I don’t know if it’s a sore subject, but I’m desperate to see the movie of
Marie and Bruce.)
Well, the movie of Marie and Bruce is moving toward the public in one way or another. It is, I feel it’s a marvelous film that everybody should see. But at the moment no one can see it. But it is slowly moving toward the public. But it is a fantastic film, with Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick, directed by Tom Cairns, who did
The Music Teacher. I hope that in one form or another the public will be allowed to see that one.
Basically, you know, people who have absolutely, uh, experience of my particular way of writing and who are expecting an ordinary drama maybe it wasn’t that.
(And what about The Master Builder – will it ever be shown?)
Well, Andre and I have been working on it for over ten years with the same group of actors. But it’s all an exercise in, what did they use to call it, crockpot cookery…slow cooking. We’ll see. I mean, well, there’s some kinks in the capitalist system, because, well, the concept of supply and demand is very very abstract. I think there are a lot of people who might demand some of these things if they’d already seen them, if they already knew about them. And if they’d seen the first one, they’d demand the second one. But if they’ve never heard of them, how can they demand them?
(And of whom would they demand them?)
Right, well, that’s the magic of the market. Supposedly, they would mysteriously appear in the market if the demand was there. This is where the system has some kinks in it.
(I’m one of the people who, if I knew from whom to demand, to see Andre Gregory’s production of
The Master Builder, I would but I don’t know whom to
petition. Besides you.)
Right.
(Tell us, and we will mount an internet campaign! Is that what it takes, a commercial producer?)
No, I was thinking of everything I’ve done in my life, as a whole. Everything is easier if somehow demand has reached the level where people are clamoring. If there were a lot of people like you, a lot of things would be easier.
(It’s hard to know what “a lot of people” is – a few thousand, a few million, the George Trow grid of one person vs. grid of one million.)
Exactly.
(Anything else you want to play or finish up? Is there a director involved with
Grasses of a Thousand Colors? Or is that one of the things you can’t divulge?)
I’m going to talk about it all at once.
(Those of us who are Wally Shawn fans are eager for the manifestation of this new work.)
I mean, I’m, if we’re sort of doing a review of my life, I suppose I would say that the only thing we haven’t touched on in my writing life is I did devote three years of my life to my translation of Brecht, which I believe in, and I feel it’s going to be a fight until my death, I’m going to ultimately , I will fight for the right of my translation to live. Because I sincerely believe it is the most faithful to the spirit of Bertolt Brecht. And I believe it’s going to be a fight until death…
(To get it published or produced more widely?)
I’m going to say for the moment, to allow it to live. Because there are a lot of different fights. But I think I’m not going to get into that in this article.
(That’s a whole other conversation which I’d love to have. I was aware it’s a big subject and it’s …)
But it’s a very big conversation because it involves not just me but Tony Kushner and other … mine is the most complex because it involves Brecht and Weill, but the subject of Brecht in English is a very hot topic and a very interesting topic. This is a very very important playwright, and well, Craig Lucas is also working on a translation of Brecht.
(Which one?)
I knew the answer to that a few weeks ago.
(One of the ones we all know?)
Yes.
(Not Good Person, not Caucasian Chalk Circle.)
It could be one of those two. And of course Tony did Mother Courage.
(He also did Good Person.)
Yes.
(But there’s an issue with the estate over who gets to publish and who gets to produce their adaptation?)
Yes, because the Weill estate … if someone wants to do The Threepenny
Opera, the Weill estate has to approve the production. So they can disapprove. If the people go to the Weill estate and say we’re all going to do it wearing funny hats, the Weill estate will say we don’t want you to do it.
(Were you happy with Scott’s production?)
I adored it, I thought it was the most amazing group of performers.
(I wish I agreed. I so didn’t like the production, the style didn’t work for me.)
How would you…turn off that tape recorder and tell me how you would characterize your objections….
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