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.
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