In a Garden State
Jason Grote in conversation with Caridad Svich
[Jason Grote's plays include 1001, This
Storm is What We Call Progress, Hamilton Township, Maria/Stuart or Platzangst,
and Box Americana. Honors include nominations for the Kesselring
Prize and the Weissberger Award; an NEA Grant via Soho Rep; a Sloan
Commission from Ensemble Studio Theatre; The P73 Playwriting Fellowship;
and "Best New Play" (for 1001) from Denver's alternative weekly,
Westword. He teaches playwriting and screenwriting at Rutgers
University, is a member of PEN and New Dramatists. This interview was
conducted via e-mail in September 2007 while Grote was in rehearsals
with 1001 in New York City and I was on a writing retreat on
Whidbey Island, WA, as part of Seattle Repertory Theatre and Hedgebrook's
Women's Playwrights Festival.]
Caridad Svich: 1001
premiered at Denver Center Theatre and premieres in NYC as a P73 production
this fall (October 2007). The play began in NYC and left NYC to find
a home and is now returning, as it were, to where it began. This process
of starting a play's life in one city and having it premiere elsewhere
is not uncommon. Let's say it's fairly standard actually. Plays come
to NYC often after having been seen in the regions. Or in other countries.
My question has less to do with development than with how you keep faith
in a play's potential and its vision over time?
Jason Grote: I think it's more
about not getting tired of the play. I actually really enjoy 1001,
not only because it's mine -- I can get plenty bored or embarrassed
by my own work sometimes -- but I've talked about it a lot, to collaborators
and the public, so much so that I practically have my rap on it memorized
-- all of the stuff about Orientalism and translation/mistranslation
and Said and Borges and the Arabian Nights and so on. Luckily,
though, the rabbit hole that I've dug is deep enough and play is layered
enough that I keep finding little surprises that my subconscious must
have left. For example, I was consciously accessing the narrative and
structural games of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges (as well as
the playwright Len Jenkin), but it was only recently that I realized
that I had written it while watching the sketch comedy show Mr.
Show, which is known for using imaginative and absurd segues and
loops and running gags that use a brilliant kind of dramaturgy unseen
in most theater.
In terms of its themes, the play was written
in 2004 and 2005, during the presidential election and right before
Hurricane Katrina, which was the point when it became significantly
more mainstream to be critical of Bush et al. I'd been an activist for
years, and I'd already been arrested and been under police surveillance,
so I was eager to speak up, but I was still very conscious of the McCarthyite
atmosphere of the time. I had this feeling that I'd be blacklisted,
or at least lambasted, for writing the play, even in the comparatively
liberal circles of theater. 1001 is not very politically correct,
partially in that I am a white guy playing very fast and loose with
racial stereotypes, and that I don't soft-pedal the horrible misogyny
of the original Arabian Nights stories. On the other hand,
the play is very explicitly critical of Israeli policy, which is an
enormous taboo in this country, especially in NY. I am Jewish, and can
use that as something of a shield, but even that only goes so far. I've
been pleasantly surprised so far that the culture seems to have changed
in the last three years, to the degree where the point of view of the
play is considerably more acceptable (though I'm actually happier for
the country than I am for the play).
I want to have a successful career, but I'm perfectly
happy being outsiderish and punk rock; I'd rather have modest success
in a healthy world than be the most well-regarded playwright among the
remnants of humanity in the post-apocalyptic rubble. On the bright side,
at least a few producers and artistic directors have seen this as a
play which needs to be staged ASAP, partially in response to our current
state of affairs, which is rewarding. I think it also helps that it's
ultimately not a polemical play -- I hate leftist BS as much as right-wing
BS, perhaps even more because I consider myself to be a leftist. I'm
also very interested in the Brechtian conflict between intentions and
circumstance; we might think of ourselves as nice, educated, liberal
people, but history often has its own plans for us. Plus I think that
having my own beliefs parroted back at me, either as harangues or built
into the cause-effect structure of a narrative, bores me to tears. I'm
no fan of reactionary entertainment either -- I think 24 is
one of the most damaging pieces of popular entertainment since Triumph
of the Will -- but ultimately my responsibility is seeking whatever
imperfect version of the truth I can come up with, and engaging an audience,
because if no one's paying attention then who cares what I'm saying.
I think I get away with a lot because I'm not peddling a specific ideological
agenda and I generally respect peoples' intelligence. 1001
even got a rave review from the extreme-right Washington Times,
which sort of floored me.
CS: Describe the process with
1001 and how you were able to entrust it to Denver Theatre
Center and how that relationship has sustained you (they have commissioned
you to write a new piece).
JG: I was as amazed as anyone
that they decided to pick it up. Daniel Aukin, then the artistic director
of Soho Rep, offered to help me self-produce the play because he had
so little faith in theaters doing it, but he thought it needed to be
seen (we both agreed at the time that it wasn't right for Soho Rep).
I remember talking to the artistic director of another small downtown
theater in NYC that wanted to do a short run of 1001; I love
this company but felt like I wanted to see if 1001 could cross
over to larger theaters, and besides, Denver had the right of first
refusal. I remember her saying something like, "well, they'll never
produce it, you know those big theaters," and I thought she was probably
right. I've inveighed against big institutional theaters as much as
anyone (my primary experience having been from the outside, as an audience
member), but it turned out to be a great experience.
The only conflict we had was over the director.
They wanted Ethan McSweeny, while I originally wanted to fight for director
Liesl Tommy, with whom I had developed the play at Soho Rep -- at the
time I was naive enough to think that a huge LORT theater would let
an untried director direct a new play. I feel good that I fought for
Liesl, and I remain good friends with her, but in the end I was very
happy with Ethan's work, and I'm very excited that he's directing the
play in NY. The Denver Center provided us with amazing resources, and
everyone in the theater, from Kent Thompson on down to the marketing
and production people understood the play and put tremendous effort
into the whole enterprise. Obviously not every experience with a large
institutional theater can't be as great as this one was, but I am very
glad that this was my first.
CS: How did you find audiences
in Denver responding to what is in part a rather experimental play structurally?
JG: Very well, to my amazement.
There were a small handful of impatient walkouts, but almost every time
I saw the play it got a standing ovation. I think it helped that the
theater, aided by the DJ Sara Thurston, really made a great and ultimately
successful effort to bring in a younger audience. It's important to
me that I don't make an audience feel stupid, because I think that's
elitist and counterproductive, and as enamored as I am of theory and
postmodernism, I'm a believer in Enlightenment thought. I'm fine with
challenging an audience -- most of the theater I see doesn't challenge
me nearly enough -- but I also believe in the contract between artist
and the absent/present Other of the viewer/reader/audience. Any artist
is entitled to do whatever s/he wants, including me, but it's important
to me that I earn an audience's trust.
CS: What has it been like to
work with director Ethan McSweeny on 1001? What have you learned
about the play? And how is the process of restaging different for NYC?
JG: It's great. Ethan is a very
smart, clean director, and he's very pragmatic. He's got a very elegant
aesthetic, and his sense of symmetry meshes well with the apparent chaos
of 1001. To a less attentive director (or reader), 1001
would look like a mess -- hopefully an entertaining mess, but a mess.
However, underneath that "mess," there is actually a complex narrative
architecture that has certain labyrinthine inconsistencies designed
into it; I was very influenced by Islamic art and architecture and M.C.
Escher. Ethan does an excellent job of recognizing this and staging
the play in a way that is clear but doesn't flatten out the mystery
of the piece. We also have a certain amount of healthy argumentation
-- if I feel really strongly about something, like a music choice, I
tend to get my way, but if he's got some brilliant idea that I'm not
seeing, he's not afraid to argue for it. We're still grappling over
the most problematic scene in the play, Scheherezade's first and most
complete tale, which is a take on Vertigo combined with an
old Thomas Mann story, the ideas of Wendy Doniger, and one single sentence
in an Arabian Nights tale. We both agreed that we never hit
the tone quite right in Denver, so we're playing with things.
CS: You're a resident P73 playwright
this season. What does having a theatre home mean to you? Soho Rep has
also been a kind of home for you as playwright and administrator, and
that seemed to be a useful and genuinely supportive environment for
you to make work and advocate too for other people's work.
JG: It's become a cliche that
all playwrights are subjected to "development hell." This has its basis
in a few very real problems: big institutional theaters taking money
to promote new American plays, then relegating them to peripheral programs
while only producing established work, or arts administrators who operate
under the delusion that theater is like film, and give Hollywood-style
"notes" to writers. But the fact is that some development is necessary
-- the work I've written in the Soho Rep lab is measurably better than
stuff I've written at home and brought to theaters. P73 is great because
they're good producers dedicated to new work and emerging writers, which
is extremely rare; most young producers who do new work are artists
themselves, which is fine, of course, but they usually just wind up
focusing on their own work.
CS: What advice would you give
to younger writers about seeking out home(s) for development and training?
JG: Any writing group, even
a lousy one, is absolutely vital, because writing is essentially a social,
public act. I'd advise any beginning writer reading this to go out and
find some sort of group in his or her town or city or college and get
writing. You don't have to agree with their aesthetics, or even like
them, as long as you have a community in which to write. As far as training
goes, Mac Wellman is find of saying that MFA programs have effectively
replaced bohemia, which makes sense. It is still possible to learn through
trial and error and apprenticeships, but MFA programs provide access
and formal training in a way that is hard to find anywhere else. I should
point out, however, that eight years passed between when I finished
undergrad and when I went to NYU -- in the interim, I joined a writers'
group in Hoboken, started putting up little one-acts in rental theaters,
and eventually self-produced in the Fringe. I think it took this long
for me to really develop my work, and learn how to write about the complex
and hefty stuff that interested me, and on a personal level, it took
me that long to get it together. For a lot of those eight years, I was
smoking a lot of pot and working as a waiter in Jersey, and what I was
working on was only marginally more crafted and sophisticated than a
Kevin Smith movie, even though I wanted to write like Tony Kushner.
CS: It's tough to put a play
on in New York City. It comes down to the hard truth of real estate
and the dependence on casting celebrities in shows in order to fill
seats. What are your thoughts about skirting or confronting the reality
of NYC real estate, celeb culture and the alchemical art of writing
and putting up a play?
JG: I think the problems facing
theater are the same problems facing everything else -- for the past
three decades, every industrialized country has prioritized profit-making
and the redistribution of wealth up the income scale at the expense
of everything else -- education, healthcare, feeding ourselves, the
arts. Some might make the facile argument that the profit motive has
supported some excellent art, and that is true -- greed has led to some
excellent film, TV, music, and visual art. It probably motivated Shakespeare
to a large degree. But in the end this just cheapens our entire culture.
Live performance of the kind one sees on Broadway, or in Las Vegas,
or Branson, MO, might eventually turn a profit, and some of it can be
pretty good, and other marginalized forms of popular theater like improv
comedy or the Chitlin Circuit might still thrive. But it's a sad commentary
on our culture that even successful "legit" theater loses money, mostly
because of expensive real estate and the inability to successfully compete
with infinitely reproducible media like video (though ironically that's
the very reason why the entertainment industry is screwed anyway, due
to piracy and such).
I should add that the notion that theater should
be profitable enough to sustain itself is bullshit. It's magical thinking
to believe that any capitalist system can sustain itself without substantial
government intervention. Every profitable industry ever has received
subsidization from our tax dollars, and I would much rather see the
money taken from me by the IRS go to any art -- even art I despise -
than to some crooked war profiteer.
CS: How one uses aspects of
what is popular in culture, for instance, toward politically populist
ends theatrically can be very exciting. It can re-invigorate and reify
John McGrath's concept of the "good night out" without making it a "good
night out" in a strictly utilitarian and reductively comfortable sense.
How do you position yourself as a writer vis a vis populism? And has
your position shifted at all over the years? If so, why?
JG: I think the basic distinction
between the two words ["popular" and "populist"]
is that the "popular," as used by thinkers like Paolo Friere or Augusto
Boal, comes upward from "the people," while something "populist" is
coming from a power structure of some kind, and is designed to appeal
to "the people" in the service of a particular end, whether benevolent
or nefarious. I should also add that "the people" are defined by what
they do, rather than who they are, to paraphrase John Fiske; someone
who is oppressed in one context can easily and seamlessly become an
oppressor in another. But I think that there is a similar mistake that
both the avant-garde and the political left have made in the last few
years, which is to equate marginalization with integrity or ideological
purity. The argument goes that people are smart and should be left to
their own devices and that any attempt to approach "them" rhetorically
is manipulative and impure, soured by the legacy of Goebbels and Mao
(or, in this country, by Walter Lippmann, the father of Public Relations).
Now, I'm not advocating lying or manipulation,
but the end result of this is that the very parameters of our global
cultural narrative are defined by big media companies and PR experts,
the results of which are disastrous -- an Orwellian, fear-based culture
where words like "welfare," which literally means well-being, have been
turned into virtual obscenities. I feel a responsibility to tell the
truth in a way that actually might make a difference in peoples' lives,
not a way that makes me feel better for being all smart and cool and
cosmopolitan. This relates to avant-gardism not in such a way that I
think artists should imitate Hollywood or the video game industry --
I can't emphasize strongly enough that artists should do whatever they
want -- but in that there's no inherent conflict between being "experimental"
and being popular.
I love moves and TV and comics and genre fiction
and pop music and comedy and the internet, but I also take great joy
in outsider art, the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the novels of Don
DeLillo, the poetry of John Ashbery, whatever the hell is on WFMU, and
"downtown" artists like Radiohole (with whom I'm collaborating) and
Young Jean Lee. Work that's deemed "experimental" can often be much
more entertaining than some of the boring crap one sees on TV or in
comic books, and by the same token it can also be just as ossified as
mainstream art -- for example, I think Robert Wilson stopped experimenting
a long time ago -- whether or not one likes his work, he's got a distinctive,
solidified style that's every bit as recognizable as Stephen Spielberg's.
CS: Writers in the U.S. theatre
tend to have half-lives. There's this spurt of acclaim and productions,
let's say, followed sometimes by dormancy, and then if you're lucky
you're discovered again. I recall one of Arthur Miller's last televised
interviews (on PBS) where he said that he felt if he had made his life
as a dramatist abroad, his career would have been quite different, just
in the sheer level of constancy and patience he said he felt producers
and audiences had, say, in the U.K. with their dramatists. How do you
feel at this moment in time where there is surge and momentum around
your work, and have you any thoughts about how to keep and build an
audience?
JG: Well, I'm flattered to be
asked this question, but I don't think my star has risen so much that
I have to worry about it falling. I'm not terribly concerned about this
-- it sounds to me like one of the many silly but ultimately damaging
prejudices one finds in the American theater: others include the notion
that audiences aren't interested in new work, or unconventional work,
or work by women or artists of color, or that the audiences for these
kinds of plays "don't see theater." It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
-- producers go back to that same old well over and over again, theaters
cannibalize their shared audience instead of expanding it, and that
core audience is quite literally dying. I feel I can do something about
this "sophomore slump" issue by doing what I've done in regard to these
other issues -- lobbying institutional theaters, using print media and
the internet to debunk myths and promote work that I enjoy, finding
communities of mutual support, and self-producing if necessary.
But I also think it's important to parse the
question itself. I'm starting to realize that being a successful playwright
can be a sort of trap -- I've recently had to cut back on all of the
essay-writing, blogging, and emailing I've been doing, but I'm still
swamped with production responsibilities and meetings and speaking engagements
and things like that. I can really see how playwrights having a moment
in the sun want to trade on their popularity and wind up writing sub-par
plays due to distraction or burnout or any number of factors. I don't
really have an answer to this, aside from the fact that I've written
five plays in the four years since grad school, all of which I feel
are production-ready, so I'm about due for a break; to paraphrase the
poet Philip Levine, I'll let them go out and work for a while. Though
I should add that I am under commission from three different theaters,
and none of them would be happy to hear that. I do plan to make good
on all of those projects, but I'm my own toughest critic, and hearing
or seeing work that I know isn't finished is like nails on a chalkboard
for me, so I'm reluctant to see the work produced before it's ready,
even though productions are so rare and precious.
The other issue is, no one in this field ever
really feels successful. We're always restless, because we're artists,
and besides, there's always something to complain about. I might be
having a pretty good year, but there are a lot of life goals -- boring
bourgeois things like owning a home, having children, or getting out
of debt -- that I have yet to achieve. If theater became more frustrating
than it was rewarding, I have all kinds of other things I'd like to
do -- I'd like to write for film or TV for example, or do comedy, or
script a comic book. I could spend some time writing fiction or nonfiction
or being an activist. Hell, if I was financially solvent enough I could
thoroughly enjoy just traveling and bumming around for a while.
CS: I think as writers we are
as much about what we don't like as what we do. So to subvert the usual
question: what don't you read, don't you gravitate toward for inspiration,
and how do you think it affects what you make for the theater?
JG: I really dislike "political"
plays that are more about making the audience feel smart than actually
fomenting any kind of change (or at least making interesting art). I
don't like anything that takes the point of view of powerful people
-- I'm far more interested in people on the ground in Iraq, or some
mid-level functionary at Halliburton, that I am with anyone in the White
House. They're crooks, who cares how they intellectually justify their
crimes? I hate pretty much any political coverage on TV, especially
those talking head pundit shows -- they're reactionary and stupid and
boring and awful. I don't like bad, derivative comedy, exploitative
reality TV (though I love Project Runway),
CS: So do I. I admit it. That
show completely hooks me.
JG: Or anything that's based
on an ad. I hate most top-40 music, though I am obsessed with music
generally, mostly indie rock, hip-hop, and jazz. I don't like football,
or any video game more advanced than the 1989 version of Super Mario
Brothers. I think Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is
more or less a buffoon, and I don't like Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees
because he was mean to my friend Tom once. In most cases, these things
fuel blog rants more than plays, though all my outrage provides a sort
of creative engine. Many of my plays are refutations of ideas I strongly
disagree with; for example, in many ways 1001 is a full-throated
refutation of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" idea.
CS: We've chatted about this
briefly but you said it's really when you read Tony Kushner's work that
your world kinda changed about what was and wasn't possible in theater.
I definitely see Kushner's influence in your writing. Especially in
This Storm we call Progress. But what intrigues me more in
a way, because Kushner's influence is also a generational thing, is
your keen interest and love of Kaufman & Hart's work. You reference
Kaufman & Hart structures in Maria/Stuart for instance. I have
great affection for Philip Barry's work and cite him as influence but
it is work that is less on everyone's lips, not to mention fingertips
... again this question of cultural forgetting ... How'd you come to
Kaufman and Hart and why? And what lessons can we learn today from their
work?
JG: I loved You Can't Take
It With You when I was a kid, but rediscovered them recently, first
from speaking to David Lindsay-Abaire and then to David Adjmi. The first
David referred to his play Fuddy Meers as a cross between Kaufman
& Hart and Sam Shepherd, and the second referred to his work generally
as Kaufman & Hart style screwball comedy combined with the heavy theory
and dark, political themes that one tends to find in Kushner, Naomi
Wallace, Caryl Churchill, or even Sarah Kane. What's great is that Kaufman
& Hart style comedy -- which itself owes a lot to Moliere, Chekhov,
and vaudeville -- can be a great way to explicate fairly advanced ideas
in a novel and interesting way. It's not for nothing that the entire
Algonquin Round Table were pinkos, and beneath the laffs and the breezy
entertainment, there are some pretty serious themes, usually about conformity,
identity, and class.
CS: When I read your work I
can't help but feel in it a distinct US sensibility, as opposed to say
other U.S. playwrights where one can detect European or Latin American
writing structures, themes and motifs at play in concert with U.S. ones.
This is simply an observation. Not a criticism. But I do wonder and
maybe this gets us back to NJ somehow, where you're from, but what do
you see as North American (tapping into specific U.S. modalities) about
your work, use of language, etc? How do you or don't you identify as
a U.S. artist?
JG: I'm not particularly nationalist,
but I suppose that I am very American in my sensibilities. I'm reminded
of Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- for years, people associated his brand
of magic realism with some sort of Latin exoticism, when really he was
just trying to imitate Kafka. I'm probably just as influenced by European,
Asian, and Latin American writers as I am by American ones, but everything
is filtered through my particular working-class New Jersey worldview,
or maybe my positivism, or maybe my aggressive temperament or desire
to entertain, or whatever it is. I'm also really interested in specificity,
though -- I don't care where the place is, or even if it's entirely
fictional, as long as it's specific. I get alternately bored and infuriated
by this popular trend in European theater to make stuff that seems to
take place in some sleek, Baudrillardian avant-garde nowheresville.
I'm not talking about artists who create worlds -- for example, WaxFactory
do a lot of that sort of multimedia work, but what they do is aesthetically
specific and distinct, and I enjoy it thoroughly -- but the sort of
infatuation with airports and malls and generic landscapes.
When I was in Slovenia recently, I heard someone
say that one place wasn't like another, so there should be nothing specifically
Slovenian in their plays. Now, I understand their reluctance to explore
national identity in the wake of the Balkan wars, but it's absurd to
assert that there's nothing culturally specific about an entire country,
which is actually very unlike its neighbors. When I was there, my translator
and my director got into a fight, partially because the director was
cartoonishly egomaniacal, but also because he wanted to eliminate all
of the specific American references from my play. He claimed that Slovenians
wouldn't get it, but I argued that that didn't matter -- any work of
art, naturalistic and linear or surreal and avant-garde -- contains
some sort of didactic element with reference to familiarizing an audience
with something new. One doesn't need to understand every detail of 19th-century
Russian rural bourgeois culture in order to understand Chekhov, for
example.
In fact, that's one of the strengths of Marquez,
especially in One Hundred Years of Solitude -- the fact that
he throws you into the cultural protoplasm of 18th- or 19th-century
Colombia, a place that had little use for time, maps, or fixed cultural
definitions, without explaining any of it away. Anyway, maybe the view
that universal values can best be expressed in culturally specific terms
is particularly American. It could also be that I'm still heavily influenced
by the first writers that ever really meant something to me, most of
whom were from the U.S. Though my tastes are considerably more catholic
now, the first writers that really made an impact on me were Twain,
Thoreau, Melville, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Kerouac, and
sci-fi and fantasy authors like L. Frank Baum, Ursula K. LeGuin, Madeline
L'Engle, Ray Bradbury, and Robert A. Heinlein, all of whom have a very
uniquely American outlook in one way or another.
One thing that isn't really American about me
is that I believe in a mix of social and individual agency rather than
individual agency on its own. That is, like Marx, I believe that most
of the forces that shape our lives are human-made, but not under our
actual control -- basically, like any episode of The Wire.
Though I also think the opposite of that -- that individual action can
have far-reaching if unpredictable effects, like the pop-scientific
chaos-theory notion of a butterfly in Africa eventually causing a tornado
in Kansas. Similarly to New Jersey, I don't want to sugarcoat the U.S.
-- in many ways we're a colossally stupid, bigoted, violent and unjust
country, and I think that goes for the "blue" states as well as the
"red" ones -- but we've also managed to jump-start a few pretty significant
large-scale experiments. I don't believe we're the most democratic country
in the world, but flawed and corrupt as our history has been, we have
managed to pull off the first revolution that actually worked.