Punctuation

 

[This is a post about writing.   I taught writing for several years at several schools in the 1980s and ’90s and I also did some writing for publication, mostly about theater, many of which pieces have ended up revived here on Rick On Theater. 

[I’m firmly and unshakably convinced that the ability to write simply and clearly anything from an office memo to a Ph.D. dissertation to the latest journalistic exposé is still an absolute necessity in our world. 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will know, writing is a focus of mine.  I’ve taught it and blogged on it frequently.  While I was still teaching the subject, I collected articles from many sources on the subject of writing and teaching writing; a list of posts is included in my afterward to this post.]

 

“IN FINE PRINT,
PUNCTUATION TO PUNCTURE PEDANTS WITH”
by Sarah Boxer 

[Both of the articles compiled in this post are by the same author, Sarah Boxer.  The first one up is actually the second published.  It ran in the New York Times on 4 September 1999 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”], “Arts & Ideas”). 

[I call this post “Punctuation” because two of the subjects of the two articles are questions marks, below, and semicolons, in the second piece.  Boxer, however, also covers a couple of other elements of written documents in this article: the footnote and what she calls marginalia.]

If footnotes, quotations and marginalia, beloved by pedants and bores, were suddenly to vanish from the planet, you might say: “Yippee! Good riddance to all that received wisdom and tiny typeface. Farewell to the dutiful handmaidens of authority.” But not so fast.

Three scholars from three different fields have independently given these tools of scholarly oppression a revolutionary edge. Quotation marks, footnotes and marginalia aren’t just the voice of authority: they are actually the apparatus of subversion, sarcasm, irony and nastiness.

Consider the quotation mark. In the current issue of the journal “Critical Inquiry,” Marjorie Garber [b. 1944], the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and the director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University, has an article called “ “ (Quotation Marks).

[Garber’s Critical Inquiry article (Vol. 25, No. 4 [Summer, 1999]: 653-679) is a little difficult to interpret by its title as it’s reproduced above.  On the title page of Critical Inquiry, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the university’s Department of English Language and Literature, it’s printed as:

“  ”
                        (Quotation Marks)

[In the running head, above the published text, the essay’s title is simply indicated as “  “.  (Ordinarily, the title of a published article or essay, when cited in another document, is written within quotation marks, as in “In Fine Print, Punctuation To Puncture Pedants With.”  The Times didn’t do this above—for obvious reasons, I think, because it would come out as: ““  ””.  (Also, conventionally, the period, which isn’t part of the title, but part of my sentence in this comment, would go inside the end quotation mark.  In this instance, that would just make this situation more confusing and absurd.  I think.)  

[In the bibliography on her résumé, Garber lists this essay as: “ ‘ ’ (Quotation Marks),” but I’d find that even more confusing because she (correctly) shifts the double QM’s of her title to single ones when they’re enclosed in the double QM’s of a cited title.  I’d imagine that if someone went to find her essay from that citation, say in a database or index, they’d look for something called ‘  ‘ (Quotation Marks) . . . and never find it!  Is a puzzlement!]

One of the “curious properties of these typographical signifiers,” she writes, is that “they may indicate either authenticity or doubt.” Sometimes quotations are meant to lend authority, Ms. Garber suggests, but the most general thing you can say is that they are reminders that words are borrowed things.

“In some ways quotation is a kind of cultural ventriloquism, a throwing of the voice,” she writes. Because “every quotation is a quotation out of context,” it can be a true copy and a false representation at the same time. It is “inevitably both a duplication and a duplicity.” A quotation mark can mean either “ ‘This is exactly what was said,’ or ‘Can you imagine saying or believing this?’”

Think of the sarcastic use of the phrase “quote-unquote”: “‘The mayor’s quote-unquote dedication to duty’ means the speaker doesn’t think the mayor is very dedicated,” Ms. Garber writes. Or think of its gestural equivalent, the “air quote,” or, in Ms. Garber’s words, the “Happy Talk finger-dance.” These gestures often suggest “a certain attitude – often of wry skepticism – about the authority of both the quotation and the quotee,” she writes. Some users call them “scare quotes,” she says, suggesting Jacques Derrida’s [1930-2004; French-Algerian philosopher who developed the philosophy of deconstruction] idea that the words quoted are “under erasure” or somehow deficient.

It sounds very post-modern, doesn’t it? But irony was lurking in the quotation mark long before Mr. Derrida was in diapers. Ms. Garber quotes R. B. McKerrow’s [1872-1940; one of the leading bibliographers and Shakespeare scholars of the 20th century] 1927 book “An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students,” (with respect, not sarcasm): “Inverted commas [the British term for quotation marks] were, until late in the 17th century, frequently used at the beginnings of lines to call attention to sententious remarks.” Early quotations were not even part of the main text, Ms. Garber writes. They were left “in the margins, as glosses or evidence of what was being claimed; sometimes they looked more like modern footnotes than like quotations.”

So quotations have their roots firmly planted in the soil of doubt. And that means they can take their place next to footnotes, which recently have come to be seen as tools of subversion, too. In “The Footnote: A Curious History” (Harvard University Press, 1997), Anthony Grafton [b. 1950; historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University], Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, calls footnotes “anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.” Sure, he concedes, they are generally regarded as marks of authority, like “the shabby podium, carafe of water, and rambling, inaccurate introduction which assert that a particular person deserves to be listened to.” But still, Mr. Grafton insists, footnotes are where all the fun is.

Edward Gibbon [1737-94; English essayist, historian, and politician] used one of his 383 footnotes in [The History of] [T]he Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776-89] to make fun of the too-literal theologian who castrated himself after reading the injunction to “disarm the tempter.”

And the footnotes in Pierre Bayle’s [1647-1706; French philosopher, author, and lexicographer] 1696 sleeper, the “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” Mr. Grafton writes, are filled with pornographic biblical interpretations and salacious stories, including “Caspar Scioppius’s [Caspar Schoppe (1576-1649); German catholic controversialist, philosopher and scholar] description of the sparrow he watched, from his student lodgings at Ingolstadt, having intercourse 20 times and then dying” – as well as Scioppius’s reflection: ‘O unfair lot. Is this to be granted to sparrows and denied to men?’”

To this day, Mr. Grafton suggests, footnotes are the “toilets and sewers” of historical writing, where all the rich waste materials are dumped. They don’t just back up the narrative, they also argue with it, destroying the idea that there is one true story. They “buttress and undermine at one and the same time.” So, you might conclude, footnotes are the height of subversion. Wrong again. Long before footnotes had their vogue in the 18th century, medieval artists invented a far more radical kind of marginalia.

In “Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art” (Harvard University Press, 1992) Michael Camille [1958-2002; British art historian, academic, and influential, provocative scholar and historian of medieval art and specialist of the European Middle Ages], an art historian at the University of Chicago, tells the story of the “lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses” and copulating animals, populating the edges of illuminated manuscripts.

In the Middle Ages, the illuminator would do his work after the scribe was finished, Mr. Camille writes, and “that gave him a chance of undermining . . . the written word.” For example, in the Rutland Psalter of 1260, the illuminator colored the manuscript so that “the letter ‘p’ of the Latin word conspectu (meaning to see or penetrate visually)” turns into an arrow that flies into the posterior of a prostrate fish-man, Mr. Camille writes.

“The medieval image-word was, like medieval life itself, rigidly structured and hierarchical,” Mr. Camille writes. “For this reason, resisting, ridiculing, overturning and inverting it was not only possible, it was limitless.” The margins of illuminated manuscripts were a playground. By the close of the 13th century “no text was spared the irreverent explosion of marginal mayhem.”

From the look of the illuminated manuscripts, with their monkey-suckling nuns and bird-headed Jesuses, you can guess where footnotes and quotations get their subversive edge. The margins, Mr. Camille writes, were the place “not only for supplementation and annotation but also for disagreement and juxtaposition – what the scholastics called disputatio” and what we might call talking back.

There’s a lesson here: the marginal has always been marginal.

[Sarah Boxer is a writer of non-fiction and graphic fiction, and a former critic and reporter for the New York Times (1989-2006), where she covered various topics including photography, psychoanalysis, and art.  She has published three books: In the Floyd Archives (Pantheon, 2001), a cartoon novel based on Freud’s case histories, its post-Freudian sequel Mother May I? (Ipbooks, 2019) and the anthology Ultimate Blogs (OverDrive [e-book], 2008).  Boxer has also been a contributing writer at The Atlantic and has written articles, essays, and reviews for the New York Review of Books, the Comics Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Photograph, Slate, and Artforum.

[A propos of this article by Sarah Boxer, another piece, somewhat lighter of heart, appeared in the Times on 9 January 1994.  It wasn’t really an “article,” but a multi-footnoted comic strip, a put-on making fun of the proliferation and expansion of footnotes in academic—and non-academic—writing.

[The piece, entitled “The Annotated Calvin and Hobbes” by Eric P. Nash, who was a researcher for the New York Times for 25 years, where he wrote more than 100 articles.  It appeared in the Times in “Education Life” (Sec. A) at the end of the magazine as a section entitled “End Paper.”

[Calvin and Hobbes is a daily comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson [b. 1958] that was syndicated from 18 November 1985 to 31 December 1995.  At its height, it was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide and appeared in more than 50 countries.

[The strip follows six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, a tiger named Hobbes.  While seemingly simple, the comic often describes abstract topics.  Even the names of the titular characters draw upon philosophy; Calvin is named after the Swiss Protestant Reformer, John Calvin (1509-64; French theologian), and Hobbes is named after the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679; English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book Leviathan).  References to philosophy continue throughout the comic.

[Unhappily, I can’t replicate it on the blog because it not only includes the strip itself, which Blogger makes hard to insert into posts (which is why I don’t do it often), but the typography comprises both fonts and symbols Blogger doesn’t have.  You see, “Annotated”’s footnotes have their own footnotes, each level of which gets smaller and the footnote markers become more and more idiosyncratic and eccentric.

[I can’t append Nash’s column to “Punctuation,” but the Times posts it on its website, but the digital version doesn’t reproduce the comic strip and only goes as far as the sixth note of the first level of annotation.  There are nine notes in the first level and four more levels below that, each one decreasing in font size (and increasing in silliness).  (Linked to the digital text is a PDF of the printed column and the page of the paper, but it’s hard to read and may only be available to Times subscribers.  New York Times articles are also available on databases like Proquest, which is accessible through most libraries and by subscription.]

*  *  *  *
“THINK TANK:
IF NOT STRONG, AT LEAST TRICKY:
THE MIDDLEWEIGHT OF PUCTUATION POLITICS”
by Sarah Boxer 

[Boxer’s second article I’m reprinting on my blog was published in the New York Times on 6 March 1999 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”], “Arts & Ideas”).]

These days the semicolon, one of the least loved, least understood punctuation marks, barely ekes out a living between the period and the comma. It was not always that way.

Geoff Nunberg [1945-2020; lexical semantician and author], a researcher at Xerox, an adjunct professor at Stanford University and a consultant on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, has spent a lot of time thinking about the semicolon and its changing place in the world.

To understand the semicolon, said Mr. Nunberg in a recent lecture, you must first ponder written language in general. Is it merely a way to transcribe spoken language or does it have its own character? For Mr. Nunberg, the answer is clear.

Written language captures things that spoken language never could. Does anyone know, for example, what a semicolon sounds like?

Consider the sentence “Order your furniture on Monday, take it home on Tuesday.” With a comma, it means that if you order your furniture on Monday, you can take it home on Tuesday. “Order your furniture on Monday; take it home on Tuesday” is different, however; it is a double command. But sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the two sentences simply by hearing them read aloud. You need to see their punctuation to detect the difference.

If you look carefully, Mr. Nunberg said, the world of punctuation has its own rules of power politics. Commas are the weakest, semicolons are middleweight powers and colons are superpowers. Look more carefully and there is even a ranking among semicolons.

There are the weak ones (replaceable by “and,” “or” or “but”) and the strong ones (replaceable by words like “since” or “because” or even by a colon or a period.) But there is a strict law governing all of them. If there is more than one semicolon in a sentence, one cannot dominate. They must all be the weak type. There is parity.

This law of nondominance also governs the weakest type of semicolon, which Mr. Nunberg calls a “promotion” semicolon, a semicolon that would have been a comma if there were not already too many commas in the sentence. Here is an example: “He has written books on Tinker, the shortstop; Evans, the second baseman; and Chance, the first baseman.” In this sentence all semicolons are created equal, and they are all more equal than the commas.

There was not always such a restrictive, democratic order governing semicolons. Mr. Nunberg discovered that in the 19th century and early 20th century, semicolons were as loose and carefree as commas are now.

T. S. Eliot [1888-1965; American-born poet, essayist, and playwright who became a British citizen in 1927] used what is known as the appositional semicolon: “The essential is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world; a world which the author’s mind has subjected to a process of simplification.”

Jane Austen [1775-1817; English novelist] used semicolons to introduce subordinate clauses. In “Persuasion,” she wrote: “His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own.”

Mr. Nunberg even found writers who let their semicolons dominate other semicolons in the same sentence. In “Middlemarch,” George Eliot [pseud. Mary Ann Evans (1819-80); English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator] wrote: “But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself.” In that sentence, the second semicolon, working like a colon or period, dominates the first semicolon, which acts like a comma. How could she let that happen?

Did 19th- and early 20th-century writers sprinkle semicolons without any sense of propriety or limits? Or were there rules for semicolons that are obscure to us now? After looking at passages from T. S. Eliot, Henry James [1843-1916; American-British author], George Eliot and Jane Austen, Mr. Nunberg at last discovered the old law of the semicolon: A semicolon that wants to dominate another semicolon in the same sentence must wait for the end of the sentence; and then it can act like a colon, trumping the rest; the last semicolon gets the last laugh.

*  *  *  *

[On 24 March 1996, Sarah Boxer published “Teachers, Teach Thyselves” in the New York Times (Section 4 [“Week in Review”], “Ideas & Trends”) which reported:

This month (4 March 1996) the National Council of Teachers of English released “Standards for the English Language Arts,” which outlined, in mind-numbing terms, what students from kindergarten to 12th grade should learn.  Tucked in it was a glossary that defined obscure words, such as “listening” and “spelling.”

[Boxer excerpted some passages—definitions of terms used in English and writing classes.  (Readers of Rick On Theater will know that I have taught writing and also a little English [high school].)  I’m going to excerpt Boxer’s excerpts, and republish a few pertinent definitions.]

audience  The collection of intended readers, listeners or viewers for a particular work or performance.

grammar  The means by which the different components of language can be put together in groups of sounds and written or visual symbols so that ideas, feelings and images can be communicated; what one knows about the structure and use of one's own language that leads to its creative and communicative use.

punctuation  An orthographic system that separates linguistic units, clarifies meaning and can be used by writers and readers to give speech characteristics to written materials.

spelling  The process of representing language by means of a writing system or orthography.

writing  1. The use of a writing system or orthography by people in the conduct of their daily lives to communicate over time and space. 2. The process or result of recording language graphically by hand or other means, as by the use of computers or braillers.

[The posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing are: Bad Writing (19, 22, 25, 28, and 31 May 2025), “Two Passings: Peter Elbow and Athol Fugard” (17 March 2025), “Peter Elbow and Freewriting” (12 March 2025), “How I Write” (25 February 2022). “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In” (28 July 2015), “Why Write?” (4 March 2013), “Writing” (9 April 2010), and “On Reviewing” (22 March 2009).]

 

Theater Kids

 

[The term "theater kid" (or “theatre kid,” as it is below) typically refers to a young person, usually a student, who is deeply passionate about and involved in theatrical performance.  They are often characterized by their enthusiastic embrace of performing arts, particularly musicals, and may exhibit traits like spontaneously breaking into song—almost always one from a musical—or quoting lines from shows. 

[I wasn’t a theater kid.  As I explain in “A Broadway Baby,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 September 2010, I was introduced to theater as a young boy, but though I did the usual school performances in elementary and middle school, I wasn’t “deeply passionate” about acting.

[I also don’t insist on spelling it t-h-e-a-t-r-e, as John DeVore asserts below that all theater kids do.  I will honor the preference of each theater organization for the spelling of its name, but otherwise, I go with the American spelling.  I do not buy the distinction that theatre refers to the art form and theater to the venue.

[By the way, "Broadway baby" most commonly refers to someone, often a performer, who is deeply involved with or passionate about Broadway theater.  I guess that applies well enough.  Though, I go to a lot of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater, and regional repertory productions as well.

[I did a couple of plays in high school, but only my first two years.  I transferred to schools in Switzerland for the rest of high school, and they didn’t have student theater—and I didn’t miss it.  (See “Going to a Swiss International School” [29 April, 2, 5, 8, 11, and 14 May 2021].)

[I did more stage work in college and joined the university’s Troubadours, the extra-curricular theater group, and then, when I was in the army and stationed in Berlin—and no longer a “kid”—I found myself drawn to theater and acting as an amateur.  (See “Berlin Memoir” [16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, 11 and 29 March 2017, and 13 April 2017].)

[Then I got out of the service and came to New York City—I’m a native Washingtonian—to go to acting school.  I got an MFA in acting, knocked around New York auditioning, doing a lot of Off-Off-Broadway shows, trying my hand at directing and doing a little teaching. 

[Then I saw that I wasn’t advancing in the profession.  I went back to school for a doctorate with an eye on teaching full time—just at the moment when I was offered a role by one of the theaters back in the city where I was born!  I’d already committed to attending school for that Ph.D., but I toyed with blowing it off for the stage gig . . . but I decided it was a chimera, and stuck with my original plan. 

[I discovered that what I was good at was writing about this subject.  I got some articles published, delivered a few papers at conferences—not really my favorite thing, it turned out—and contributed to a couple of books.  I even won a prize with one of my essays.  Then, in 2009, I started this blog.  This will be my 1,281st post—though not all of them have been on theater, or written by me.

[Now, to the matter at hand in this post, John DeVore’s memoir of his sojourn into the land of theater.  He says theatre, but I’m stickin’ to my guns (prop guns, of course).  In addition to “A Broadway Baby,” which is my memoir of encountering theater at a boy, I have posted a number of pieces here that touch on children and young people’s encounters with theater. 

[Some are about youngsters engaging in the theater world itself, and others are about theater in the schools.  What I’m not going to list here are the posts about “children’s theater” or “theater for young audiences,” which cover theater for young people by adults.  That’s an important gateway for kids to get into theater, but it’s different, I feel.

[Here’s the list, with links, to ROT’s coverage of theater and kids (note that several of these titles contain multiple articles):

    • “Missoula Children’s Theatre” (28 August 2009
• “Making Broadway Babies” (25 November 2013)
• “Kids on the Broadway Boards” (30 November 2013)
• “Nobody Wants to See a Tired Bat on Stage” by Oona Haaranen (9 January 2014)
• “Musical Theater Programs for Kids” (18 May 2018; rerun on 5 February 2023)
• “Jimmy Awards” (2 September 2024)

[For the other posts on children and theater and the arts in schools, I suggest using the search engine a the top left corner of the screen, or browse through the archives to the left of the text column.  You can also click on an appropriate label at the bottom of the post.]

“HOW TO TELL IF YOU’RE A THEATRE KID”
by John DeVore

[This excerpt of John DeVore’s memoir appeared on the American Theatre website.   The piece is categorized as “Book Excerpts” and is dated 6 September 2024.  It wasn’t published in the print edition of the magazine.]

In this excerpt from a new memoir about his years toiling Off-Off-Broadway, the author reflects on what it means to be young and bitten by the acting bug. 

Lights up on a small theatre in Brooklyn, New York. Enter John DeVore, late 40s. His hair and beard are streaked with gray. He stands in a spotlight centerstage and says: 

My name is John, and I’m a theatre kid. I’m a theatre kid the way a raccoon is a raccoon, or a pineapple is a pineapple. I like to think of it as my astrological sign, something about me that is fixed. It is who I am, and I had little choice in the matter.

During one of my very first school plays, a teacher suggested I had been bitten by the acting bug, contracting a virus with no known cure. But I knew better: I had been screaming for attention since I was born. If I could have been the opposite of a theatre kid, I would have. But I can’t be who I’m not. I’m pretty sure the opposite of a theatre kid is a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Being a theatre kid is like that Groucho joke about not wanting to join a club that would have you as a member. That’s my experience, at least. I’ve never been a joiner. If I could change that about me, I would. I want to be loved and left alone at the same time. That is my default setting. My therapist is always telling me to open my heart to other people, and my usual response to his gentle requests is, “I’m trying, Gary.”

[Groucho Marx (1890-1977) was a comedian, actor, writer, and singer who performed on the vaudeville stage and in films and on television, radio, and the stage. Groucho made 13 movies with his brothers (Chico [1887-1961], Harpo [1888-1964], Gummo [1892-1977], and Zeppo [1901-79]), who performed under the name the Marx Brothers. He later had a successful solo career, primarily on radio and television, most notably as the host of the game show You Bet Your Life (radio: 1947-60; NBC-TV: 1950-61).

[As for the joke about joining a club, it was long attributed to Groucho, and in both his son’s biography of his father, My Life with Groucho (Simon and Schuster, 1954) and Groucho’s own memoir, Groucho and Me (Bernard Geis Associates, 1959), both men quote the “Resignation Joke,” which they record as Groucho’s withdrawal from the Friars Club (sometime around 1950-52). In Groucho’s rendering, he sent a telegram stating: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”]

I once denied being a theatre kid, a bit like how the apostle Peter repeatedly lied when asked by the mob if he knew Jesus. My denial happened years ago, in the late aughts. 2008? Right before the economy cratered. Those were dark times for me. I had gone on an impromptu weeknight bender with a former colleague—a lonely old journalist with a talent for sniffing out bullshit and a sickening thirst for crème de menthe—who suspected I had acted in high school or college. I just laughed him off. Me? A theatre kid? No.

And my ruse would have worked had we not stumbled, piss-drunk, into a nearly empty karaoke bar and had I not insisted on performing a sloppy, surprisingly poignant rendition of the popular torch song “On My Own” from the blockbuster 1987 Broadway mega-musical Les Misérables—which, if you’re not aware, is a weepy, blood-and-thunder pop opera written by Claude-Michel Schönberg [French; b. 1944] and Alain Boublil [French, born in Tunisia; b. 1941] and based on Victor Hugo’s [French; 1802-85] 19th-century novel [1862] about poor French vagrants suffering beautifully. “On My Own” is sung by the forlorn street waif Eponine, who pines after handsome revolutionary Marius, whose heart in turn belongs to Cosette, the adopted daughter of our hero, ex-convict Jean Valjean. Eponine is a lonely victim of unrequited love, and later she dies in Marius’s arms, fulfilling the deepest, darkest, most pathetic fantasy of anyone who has ever longed for someone they could never have.  

[The French version of Les Misérables premièred in Paris at the Palais des Sports on 24 September 1980. Its English-language adaptation, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer (1925-2020), produced by Cameron Mackintosh (b. 1946), has been running at the Barbican Centre London since 8 October 1985. The London show had its 15,000th performance on 28 September 2023.

[The musical had a pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House in Washington, D.C., on 27 December 1986 and ran there for eight weeks through 14 February 1987. The production then transferred to the Broadway Theatre on 12 March 1987. It moved to the Imperial Theatre on 17 October 1990, and after 6,680 performances in 16 years, it closed on 18 May 2003. It won eight 1987 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score. There were Broadway revivals in 2006 and 2014.]

My former colleague could see the truth in my tear-filled eyes as I sang with everything I had. I couldn’t help myself. I was feeling it. I sang like I was competing for a Tony Award. I did that thing Broadway divas do where they slowly push one jazz hand toward the heavens as the emotions swell. I was in church, and from the back pew, I could hear him laughing and pointing at me like I was a fool. He knew a theatre kid when he saw one.

Like I said: dark times.  

How can you tell if someone you know, or even love, is a theatre kid? Ask yourself this: Do they take a lot of selfies? Do. They. Enunciate. Every. Word? Do they frequently sigh heavily? Do they talk about themselves and their manifold feelings incessantly? These are just a few of the signs. Do they spell it t-h-e-a-t-r-e instead of t-h-e-a-t-e-r? That’s a good one. Only a true theatre kid spells it “theatre.” A “theater” is where you watch “theatre.” You see? No? This difference matters, and if you don’t think it does, you’re probably not a theatre kid, which may come as a relief to many of you.

Now, I need you to know that I know that t-h-e-a-t-r-e is just the British spelling of the word. But I much prefer the other explanation, don’t you? It’s more romantic. The theatre is an ancient art, a sacred, almost holy occupation. It’s a way to teach moral lessons and to celebrate the human condition; it is a story full of sound and fury that can levitate you or knock you sideways. The theatre is a spirit—and the theater is where you sit and cough politely, and then the curtain rises. There might not even be a curtain. A theater can be a space, any space. A storefront, an apartment living room, a parking lot.

This wisdom has been passed down from theatre kid to theatre kid from time immemorial. It was a veteran of my high school’s drama program who taught me the difference between theatre and theater. She was a full year older than me, but she knew things. I thought she was brilliant. I remember listening to her intently: Theatre was life. This lesson probably happened over cups of creamy, sugary coffee and plates of baklava at the local 24-hour diner, where all the theatre kids at my high school would go to celebrate after a successful production—a one-act or the spring musical.

We’d pour into the diner like an army of frogs, laughing and talking a mile a minute and singing show tunes, and the poor servers endured our overbearing youthful cheerfulness. My true theatre education happened either at that diner or backstage, during rehearsal breaks, and these impromptu lectures are the closest thing to an oral tradition in action I’ve ever encountered.  

These 16-year-old elders patiently explained the superstitions and rules of the theatre, and I did the same when it was my turn to pass on the lore. I remember the rules like commandments: Never whistle backstage or say the name of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy about that Scottish couple who make a series of poorly thought-out career decisions. Both of those things are bad luck. [See my four-part series “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions” (14, 17, 20, and 23 August 2020).]

Saying “good luck” is also bad luck. You’re supposed to say “break a leg.”  

There are all sorts of explanations as to what that phrase means. I was told, over a plate of french fries, that in ye olden times, the mechanism that raised and lowered the curtains was called a leg, and so to break a leg would mean that the audience cheered for so many encores, the curtain went up and down and up and down until it broke. Is that true? I have no idea. That’s just how I heard it.  

Here are a few more sacred rules: Give flowers after a performance, not before. Always open the stage door for one of your fellow castmates and invite them to enter first with a graceful bow. One of my favorites warns against putting your shoes on any table backstage. Don’t do that. Why? I don’t think you want to find out. 

There were also practical, straightforward rules about rehearsal and being part of a production. Always be on time. (“If you’re 10 minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.” That was the mantra. I was told to repeat it and to repeat it.) Don’t skip rehearsal. Memorize your lines. Stretch before every performance, and drink nothing but hot water with lemon juice and honey if you catch a cold. And never, ever become romantically involved with someone in the cast—a rule that was broken during every production at my high school, sometimes multiple times. Show romances were a huge no-no. This rule was meant to keep rehearsals drama-free. But rehearsals are intense and intimate, and it’s almost impossible to keep theatre kids from trying to make out with other theatre kids.

Show romances—also known as “showmances”—were looked down on, even by those who had them. The only exceptions were hookups between cast and crew, which worked in my favor. I will always be a sucker for a girl who can use power tools, because I cannot use power tools, and I fell for stage managers and set builders. A boy never hit on me, but I was ready for it, just in case, and had practiced a flattered, “I like you, but I don’t like-like you” speech in the mirror. I never got to perform that speech, which disappointed me. A few years later, in college, a beautiful man kissed me on the dance floor of a party. It was a deep and playful kiss, and before I could stammer, “I like you, but I don’t . . .,” he had disappeared into the crowd, and now that I think about it, that was disappointing too.

When I was a senior I gave the newbies at the diner a variation of the speech I was given in ninth grade. It went something like: “Look around at this table. These are the friends you’ll have for the rest of your life.” That wasn’t true, but in the moment it felt true, and that’s good enough. I also passed along to them what was passed to me, from senior to frosh, and that is to always, always attend the closing night cast party, and to stay until the very end.

*  *  *  *

The publisher’s description:

Friendship. Grief. Jazz hands.

In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an eccentric family of broke art-school survivors staged an experimental, four-hour adaptation of William Faulkner’s [1897-1962] novel As I Lay Dying [1930] inside an enormous wooden coffin that could barely fit the cast, much less an audience.

The production’s cast and crew—including its sweetly monomaniacal director—poured their hearts and paychecks into a messy spectacle doomed to fail by any conventional measure. It ran for only eight performances. The reviews were tepid. Fewer than one hundred people saw it. But to emotionally messy hack magazine editor John DeVore, cast at the last minute in a bit part, it was a safe space to hide out and attempt sobering up following a devastating loss.

An unforgettable ode to the ephemeral, chaotic magic of the theatre and the weirdos who bring it to life, Theatre Kids is DeVore’s buoyant, irreverent, and ultimately moving account of outsize ambition and dashed hopes in post-9/11, pre-iPhone New York City. Sharply observed and bursting with hilarious razzle-dazzle, it will resonate with anyone who has ever, perhaps against their better judgment, tried to bring something beautiful into the world without regard for riches or fame.

Editorial Reviews:

“A wry and boisterous account . . . .  Electric prose elevates this homage to an enduring art form.” ―Publishers Weekly

“For those of us lucky to call John DeVore a friend, the skill and warmth with which he’s written Theatre Kids comes as no surprise. If you should not be in the elect group, however, the next best thing would be to read this book. There’s something funny, moving, surprising, or trenchant on every page. Often there’s all of these at once. Theatre Kids is a lemon tart made by someone who loves you, sweet and light and sharp and substantial all at once.” ―Isaac Butler, author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (see on Rick On Theater “The Method – a Review” [12 March 2022] and “Bombast to Beckett” [13 January 2025], both by Kirk Woodward)

“John DeVore is a master storyteller, and Theatre Kids is a delightful and moving read. It's a valentine to the New York City theatre scene in the late ’90s and early aughts, told through the eyes of one of the many young people who have for generations come from hamlets, small towns, and sprawling suburbs hoping to make their mark in the glittering city. DeVore will keep you laughing, gasping, and sometimes cringing all the way to the last page.” ―Catherine Burns, former artistic director of The Moth, a storytelling theater group in New York City’s Financial District

“Like all beautiful memoirs, John DeVore’s Theatre Kids will tell you not just about the author, but about things and places and people dead and gone. DeVore brings them alive again. How glad you'll be to meet them, and him. This is a funny, sad, loving, and mournful look at what artistic strivers and dreamers put themselves and others through on the quest for greatness―or, perhaps, just plain old survival.” ―Sara Benincasa, author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don't Teach You in School)

“"Theatre Kids is a rickety roller coaster ride into the hearts of New York City’s downtown theatricals – that rare breed that can turn a moldering black box and a couple of folding chairs into a diorama of the divine."” ―Mike Errico, author of Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter

“This moving memoir recounts DeVore’s life-changing experience having a bit part in a tiny, four-hour production adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel “As I Lay Dying” as he struggled with addiction and grief. The cast and crew were scrappy but passionate as they tried to bring their vision to life in a windowless theater in Brooklyn in post-9/11 New York.” ―New York Post

[John DeVore (b. 1974) is an award-winning writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and one-eyed mutt, Morley.  His debut memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway, was published by Applause Books and came out in June 2024.]

Jules Feiffer, Part 2

 

[This is the second of two Jules Feiffer interviews from The Dramatist, the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, the professional organization of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists.  Like the first interview, posted as Part 1 of the short series on 16 June, this conversation with dramatist, songwriter, journalist, and theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, was dated 1 March 2025 and ran in the Spring 2025 issue (vol. 27, no. 2), under the heading “Tributes.”

[As usual, I recommend reading Part 1, Christopher Durang’s interview with Feiffer, before reading Jeffrey Sweet’s.  There’s a lot of information in the first conversation that crops up again below, and there’s also some commentary from me that I won’t repeat here.

[And a word or two about the editing—not mine, but The Dramatist’s: the editor(s) have made a fair number of insertions here for some reason, and they’re marked with brackets.  But, then, so are mine—and you may not be able to distinguish them.  Sorry about that, but I don’t know a way around that.] 

“THE NEXT PART OF THE PUZZLE:
JULES FEIFFER INTERVIEWED BY JEFFREY SWEET”
by Jules Feiffer and Jeffrey Sweet 

The following interview, conducted in 2014, is excerpted from Jeffrey Sweet’s What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing (Yale University Press [2017]).

FEIFFER: The only class I taught in playwriting was [at Yale]. [Robert] Brustein called me up and he said, “Jerzy Kosinski was supposed to teach a class in playwriting and Jerzy tells me he’s going blind and he can’t teach. We have to find a replacement. You and I have talked about you teaching. Will you take over the class?” And I started laughing about Jerzy Kosinski going blind; I didn’t believe a word of it. I can’t remember if it was known by that time that he hadn’t written his books, but I don’t think it was out yet. He was somebody I knew and been entertained by and I liked him enormously. But I almost never believed a word out of his mouth. And so I didn’t take his going blind seriously. But I thought, “My friends are always telling me I should teach, and so why not try.” 

[Brustein (1927-2023) was then the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre. In 1979, he left Yale after 13 years and established the American Repertory Theater (ART) at Harvard University. Feiffer taught a playwriting class at Yale in 1973-74, despite having no formal training. (He attended the Pratt Institute, an art and design college based in Brooklyn, and the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan.) He drew upon his own experience and improvisation to help his students.

[Kosinski (1933-91), a best-selling Polish-Jewish novelist who had survived the Holocaust, allegedly produced some of his books through a combination of plagiarism and ghost writers. There is no concrete evidence to confirm that, in conjunction with the health issues he faced near the end of his life, Kosinski was going blind before his death by suicide. (nb: These remarks were originally footnotes, which except for one recent post, I don’t use on Rick On Theater. I’ve amended the notes slightly. ~Rick)]

I asked for [plays by the students] in advance to see some of their work and figure out what to do. And one of them was this kid named [Christopher] Durang [1949-2024; see the interview in Part 1]. He sent me a play called Titanic. And I thought, “What the fuck do I teach him?” And there was also a kid named [Albert] Innaurato [1947-2017] and so on. Just an amazing group of young people. But Chris was the one I fell in love with, more than any other. And something I said in class about Titanic he put in a play collection. He quoted me: “A prepubescent temper tantrum.” 

[Durang’s Titanic should not be confused for the 1997 Broadway musical of the same title, with which it has no connection aside from the title and setting (i.e., the ill-fated ship). Durang’s play is a one-act described as an “outrageous tale of sex and seduction aboard the titular ship” in The Facts on File Companion to American Drama (Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, eds.; Infobase Publishing, 2010).

[Titanic was presented in a workshop at New York City’s American Place Theatre in 1973 and was then performed at the Yale Experimental Theatre at YSD (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University) in May 1974. It had its professional première at the Off-Off-Broadway Direct Theatre in New York City’s Theatre District in February 1976 and then transferred Off-Broadway to the Vandam Theater (in SoHo) from 10 to 16 May 1976.]

SWEET: When you came to the class, did you have any theories about how to teach playwriting? You didn’t go through formal training yourself. 

FEIFFER: Not ‘til this minute. 

SWEET: But obviously you figured out a course of study for yourself somewhere along the line? Or is that too formal a phrase for it?

FEIFFER: Yes. What course, what study? 

SWEET: The first time your work was put onstage was as a special project in 1961 in Chicago by Second City [improvisational comedy troupe initially founded in Chicago in 1959].

FEIFFER: What made Second City such a natural for me to fall in love with and work with was that I had always improvised on paper. My basic thought process to this moment is making it all up as I go along. After it’s made up, I then start organizing it and try to give it form if the form has not emerged. Often, the form will take care of itself. If you’ve got the right story to tell, the form invents itself as you’re doing it without thinking about the form. But I’ve always been an improviser, you know, without even thinking that that’s what I was doing. 

[Second City director] Paul Sills [1927-2008; director and teacher of improvisational techniques, applying the techniques of his mother, Viola Spolin (1906-94), author of the first book on improvisation techniques, Improvisation for the Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1963)] wanted to put on the cartoons, and that became the show called The Explainers [1960], which later became Feiffer’s People [1969]. The second act included longer pieces like “Passionella” [1957] and “George’s Moon” [1962]. I thought Paul was a wonderful director for Second City—traffic guiding these guys. But for cartoon characters that were written on paper, he had very little to add or seemed to want to add. Mike [Nichols] [1931-2014] came out to see it and said he wanted to bring it to New York, but he wanted to do another version of it. I happily handed the whole thing over to him to do whatever he wanted. Mike was directing for the first time. Lewis Allen [1905-2000] was the producer. He put up the money to try it out at the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse [Clinton, New Jersey, July 1962; summer stock revue] and to bring it to New York [according to Sondheim, it didn’t get there]. Mike got Steve Sondheim [1930-2021] to write some songs for “Passionella” that were going to be part of the show. Steve had not yet done A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum [first try-out, New Haven, Connecticut: March 1962]. He wrote a couple of songs that were just extraordinary. And Mike put together a company of actors; some of them were wonderful, some of them were so-so, but mostly they were good. Ronny Graham [1919-99] and Dorothy Loudon [1925-2003]. Dorothy Loudon was so brilliant in everything that she did. She was loud, she was noisy, she was funny. I loved her. 

I was getting an education. At Second City, I understood these cartoons don’t belong on stage because they’re cartoons and they have no life. In rehearsal, what we were now calling The World of Jules Feiffer, I thought this is great stuff, but I don’t belong on the same bill with Mike and Steve. They’re too good for this. Everything they’re doing seemed to be upgrading material that was not up to their own level. I didn’t feel that I belonged in that room. I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want my first play on Broadway to be carried by Nichols and Sondheim. If I was going to write for the theatre, I wanted to be a legitimate playwright, and not to become a hit because of the favors of my friends.

SWEET: But along the way you did learn.

FEIFFER: For me it all comes out of having something to say. Politics and my anger. And my determination to say something about America that wasn’t being said. All that starts with—not the need to be funny or to write a play—but a need to blow everything up. “Look, you fuckers, don’t you know what’s going on out here? Pay attention!” And figuring out a theatrical or fictional way of saying it and inventing characters to go along with it, who then would take off in their own directions. I knew that if I expressed my rage and anger as much as I felt, there’d be no audience. I had to learn sleight-of-hand. Pretend that this was pure entertainment, and make it very funny, but deliver this impassioned, anti-authoritarian, anti-military argument. [See Part 1 for some coverage of this topic.]

I first started thinking playwriting in terms of TV writing, because of Paddy Chayefsky [1923-81] and his kitchen sink dramas [e.g.: teleplays – Marty, 1953; The Bachelor Party, 1953]. Paddy was a friend.

SWEET: And he went through a kind of metamorphosis into a satiric vein himself after the kitchen sink stuff.

FEIFFER: And for all I know I might have been an influence on that. He was in a rage, but he was always in a rage about everything, and it showed. 

SWEET: You were talking about the starting point for your plays is some kind of rage that you have to transform into a form.

FEIFFER: By the time I was 50, the rage had somewhat dissipated, but it took all that time. [See discussion of Feiffer’s Grown Ups in Part 1 for some insight on this.]

SWEET: Was there a moment when you said, “Oh, I know how to do this”?

FEIFFER: At the end of the first day’s work on Little Murders, I knew I could do this. I had never known it before, but I did the first day’s work. I was having such a good time, and I knew I could make the characters do pretty much any goddamn thing I wanted to, and I didn’t suffer over it, and I had an easy time, a fun time, writing it. I thought, “I’m a playwright.” Now, the two or almost three years to write my novel, Harry, the Rat with Women, I never for a moment thought I was a novelist. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that I was just determined to get it done, but I was not a novelist. 

SWEET: Did that lead you to think about the differences between writing novels and plays? Why one was a good fit and the other wasn’t?

FEIFFER: This is odd for somebody who does what I had always done for a living. I’ve never been very observant. I don’t see things. I see people and expressions and how they move and how they sit, and I can draw any person in any pose that they get into from my imagination. I don’t need anybody posing for me. But I don’t know what this table looks like. I don’t know what this house I live in looks like. I don’t see inanimate objects. Until [I wrote my graphic novel], Kill My Mother [Liveright Publishing, 2014], I never drew a car in my life. I could not draw cars. The first airplane I’ve ever drawn is in that book, and I had to Google “airplanes.” All the backgrounds that are rich in that book were things I didn’t know how to draw. I just don’t see these things.

I love the naturalist writers. I love the evocative writers. [Leo] Tolstoy [Russian; 1828-1910] when he writes about nature. [John] Steinbeck [1902-68] writes about scorpions crawling across the railroad and the names of trees. The only way I can name a tree is to make up the name for it, because I don’t know what any of those trees are. I don’t know the name for anything in nature. A novelist has to have that, some minimum level of equipment, where he knows what’s around him. And I don’t. 

But what I do know is how people talk. What’s always interested me, and [what] remained one of the mainstays of my comic strip, was people speaking in code. How you say one thing when you mean another. That’s basically what my work has always been about. That helping to decipher the codes in which, from childhood on, we are taught exist, and yet when you expose the code everybody denies that there is one. 

SWEET: Someone talking about acting would call that subtext.

FEIFFER: Of course, there’s subtext when a good actor goes to work with a good director. The [Mike] Nichols production of Angels in America for TV [HBO miniseries, 2003]. Al Pacino [b. 1940], who plays Roy Cohn [1927-86; lawyer and prosecutor; chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57; U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57)], listening to this kid who is worried about his marriage. Pacino/Roy is very sympathetic and very close to him and trying to be very helpful and fatherly, and you can see him making the moves on him, just very subtly, nothing sexy, but a touch here and touch there. I sat there and I held my breath. I could not believe what he was doing, because it was so gorgeous, and it was so clear. That to me is subtext at its finest.

But [what I’m talking about is] beyond subtext. It’s telling us what really is true as opposed to what appears to be happening. Now sometimes that involves subtext, other times not. 

What I loved about playwriting was—up ’til then I had to figure out how to do all that stuff in six panels or eight panels. How far can you go [in that space]? You couldn’t expose [code] in a real relationship, with two people or three people talking. That requires a scene which a comic strip isn’t going to allow you (unless it’s a graphic novel which wasn’t being done at the time and I wouldn’t have been interested in at that time). But the chance to create for myself, theatrically, the equivalent of what I saw onstage in [Eugene] O'Neill [1888-1953] and in [Arthur] Miller [1915-2005] in Death of a Salesman [1949], the Biff-Willy [Willy Loman is the lead character in Salesman; Biff is his elder son, 34] confrontation scene—where] you slowly reveal—or a character comes to reveal—a truth. The difference between Miller and me that I’ve discovered over the years is that he thought, as in the Biff-Willy scene, that you arrive at the climax and you know what the truth is. And I decided years later that you never know what the truth is, and the characters never know what the truth is. Because if you do a confrontation scene, which is supposed to lead to a climax, which was act three in those years. But in life, act three is followed by act four, act five, act six. . . [.] That confrontation is followed by other confrontations. There is no such thing as discovering the truth. It’s all the facets, all the different angles.

SWEET: And participants have their own version of what happened, and they were both right.

FEIFFER: Someone may be more right than the other, or the playwright may favor one of the people, but you have to give everyone his argument. [Except, what] Arthur would do—there’s always the lawyer character or the architect—some middle class guy with a degree that Miller never got—and you know that’s the good guy. What I determined, from the beginning, was that there weren’t going to be good guys. Nobody was going to represent my point of view. My point of view would be in everybody. All the characters, together, if I do the job right. If there’s an argument to be made here, the argument comes in putting together all the contradictory things that everybody says, as opposed to one single character speaking the truth and a light bulb flashing.

SWEET: Your cartoon work consistently depicted the corruption of logic. Frequently you have somebody start off with a statement and then there’s a modification to the statement so that in the last panel they’re saying exactly the opposite of what the first statement was. This carried over into your play The White House Murder Case [Circle in the Square Theatre, 1970], which of course came out before Watergate [political scandal of the Nixon reelection campaign and administration. 1972-74].

FEIFFER: Yes.

SWEET: Which is essentially Watergate but that people in your play spoke better than [Richard M.] Nixon [1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74; resignation, 9 August 1974] and his gang did.

FEIFFER: Well, [in that play] I had a liberal president. Not Nixon, but a good guy who wanted to do what was best. His wife gets murdered, and by the end the “best thing” to do is cover up his wife’s murder in the White House because otherwise he would not get re-elected and those other guys who were a lot worse would be in charge of the country. So, your own wife is murdered and you end up participating in the cover-up. What mattered was policy. And what really mattered was their retention of power. Basically that’s all that counted. 

SWEET: I always wanted somebody to run that in rep with my favorite underestimated [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616], King John [believed to have been written around 1594-96; published, 1623], which predicts Richard Nixon.

FEIFFER: [A] Broadway producer called me up at the time of [the] Gore-Bush [election]. He wanted to put that play on just before the election. So we had a reading of the play. And he got a wonderful cast including Alan Alda [b. 1936] and Tony Roberts [1939-2025] and invited an audience that was made up of potential backers. It played like gangbusters. It was incredible. Alan was wonderful, everybody was wonderful. And we all went out afterwards to celebrate and drink. And then it became clear that the backers didn’t want anything to do with it. No reason was given, but clearly it scared the shit out of them. This was some 25 years after the play’s premiere, and it was still too hot. There was a message in there that was still too hot for Broadway.

[Gore-Bush (2000 U.S. presidential election): Incumbent Vice President Al Gore (b. 1948; 45th Vice President of the United States: 1993-2001) was the Democratic nominee running against George W. Bush (b. 1946; Governor of Texas: 1995-2000) as the Republican nominee. Their running mates for Vice President were, respectively, Joe Lieberman (1942-2024; Senator from Connecticut: 1989-2013) and Dick Cheney (b. 1941; Secretary of Defense: 1989-93). Considered one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, with long-standing controversy about the result.

[On election night, 7 November 2000, Florida’s electoral tally showed that Bush had won by such a close margin that state law required a recount, so it wasn’t clear who’d won the presidency. After a series of legal battles, a highly controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore ended the recount with Bush winning Florida. This resulted in a major post-election controversy which was only concluded when, in a televised address on 13 December, Gore publicly conceded the election to Bush following the SCOTUS decision.

[Gore emphasized that while he disagreed with the Court’s decision, he accepted the finality of the outcome and urged his supporters to unite behind the next president. While the election conclusion led to some questioning Bush’s legitimacy, Gore’s concession helped to solidify the outcome and promote a peaceful transition of power. Bush and Cheney went on to be reelected narrowly—though less so than in 2000—in 2004 for a second term.]

SWEET: I imagine that you know that there are certain plays that are related to certain periods in your time, and certain experiences, and certain plays that you wrote earlier that if you wrote them now, you would write them differently because you’re a different writer.

FEIFFER: I’m a different human. There was a celebration of Mike [Nichols] at MOMA [Mike Nichols, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, 14 April-1 May 2009], and after they screened Carnal Knowledge [1971], I said to him, “I wouldn’t know how to write that anymore.” And he said, “I wouldn’t know how to direct it.”

SWEET: You seem to be one of the few people who is able to start from theme and make a persuasive play. I find usually when people start from theme, some life goes out of the play.

FEIFFER: I’ve always thought that, too. I thought White House would be my last theme play. I loved writing White House and Little Murders, but I thought, “I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to start with the characters and have the characters tell me what the play is about. And not really be all that sure where I’m going until the characters lead me there.” So pretty much, that’s what I’ve done since.

It was perhaps beginning with Carnal Knowledge that I was thinking [for] the first time of not leaving any fingerprints. I didn’t want to sound like playwriting or dialogue. And I remember years later I stopped in to see the movie, after not seeing it for years. Watching one of the college campus scenes, I sat there thinking, “They’re making this up, I didn’t write this.” And it thrilled me, because there’s not a thing they said that I hadn’t written. But it sounded improvised to me. And I loved that, I loved that. I love it coming out of the characters and not out of the writer.

I swore after Elliott Loves [sic: see note below] that I would never do another play. I said to Mike during rehearsals of Elliott, “This is the best I have in me. if this doesn’t work, I’m out of the business.” (And he said, “Me, too.” And I knew he was lying.) But if all this work that I did out of pure love was going to continue to be critically rejected, I was no longer making money that could allow me to be a playwright by avocation. With young children in my life, I needed to find ways of making money. At one point I could get a movie a year, to write a screenplay which they never made, and that would give me a couple of hundred thousand dollars and that would be fine. But that stopped happening when they caught on to me. For two or three months, I’d write something that I actually liked but I knew they wouldn’t make it and they never did. 

[The Dramatist’s spelling of the title of this play is incorrect: it’s Elliot Loves (with one t). The press of the time used both spellings; in at least one instance, in the same article. (I read one article in which it was spelled “Elliott” in the headline and immediately below, it was spelled “Elliot” in the column’s first sentence.) The clincher, however, is the show’s poster, which clearly says it’s Elliot Loves. (nb: I have not corrected the error in the transcription here.)

[The première was at the Goodman Theatre Studio, Chicago, on 23 April-13 May 1990. It débuted in New York at the Promenade Theatre on the Upper West Side on 7 June-15 July 1990.  Mike Nichols directed both productions.]

SWEET: You must have had a strong sense of the difference between writing for film and writing for stage. 

FEIFFER: Yes. Writing for stage is for yourself and writing for film is for money. Only with Nichols did it really work [for me in film]. Because he and I were working so closely together, and I knew that he was totally on my side.

SWEET: And he also had the power to exercise on behalf of the script.

FEIFFER: I knew also that when he found something wrong with something, it wasn’t because it was Hollywood bullshit. Even when I disagreed with him, I had to seriously consider what he was saying. Playwriting was always fun. Screenwriting became fun as a secondary enterprise. But, other than Carnal Knowledge, I never took it that seriously. It was mainly for the payday. Then I would try to get involved and I would try to do work that I thought would make a good movie. But I understood that I wouldn’t be doing this at all if I wasn’t getting a lot of money for it to pay the rent.

SWEET: One of the things that I’ve been bringing up is the contrast between American and British playwrights. In England they are often allowed to tell big stories. We in America are not allowed to tell big stories anymore. John Guare [b. 1938] had that one huge play at Lincoln Center, Free Man of Color [Vivian Beaumont Theater, 18 November 2010-9 January 2011; cast of 26]. And the other exception is Robert Schenkkan [b. 1953] and All the Way [Neil Simon Theatre (on Broadway), 6 March-29 June 2014; cast of 20]. It surprised everybody by actually breaking even and making a couple of bucks. But American playwrights think we can’t do more than ten people or we’ll never get it on.

FEIFFER: Ten people is a mob! Jesus Christ! Four or five at the tops.

SWEET: One of the reasons nobody revives Sidney Kingsley [1906-95] is today you can’t afford to have 35 people on stage. You can’t hire an actor to come on and do five lines.

FEIFFER: I liked Kingsley. I liked Detective Story [Hudson Theatre and Broadhurst Theatre, 23 March 1949-12 August 1950; cast of 34].

SWEET: Detective Story is a hell of a play. It may be old fashioned but once you give in to it . . . it takes you to the end.

FEIFFER: Those old guys were terrific. When I first came on the Dramatists Guild Council, these guys were on the Council with me. Marc Connelly [1890-1980], was a sweetheart. He was deafer than I am now, and he was the warmest and most ingratiating. As deaf as he was, I’d see him at off-Broadway plays in the front row thinking he could hear. There I was, a little Jewish cartoonist pretending to be a playwright and I was on the Council with Connelly and Kingsley and Paddy Chayefsky. How’d that ever happen? I could not believe it. I could not believe I was in the company of these extraordinary people.

SWEET: Back to teaching at Yale . . . [.] When you were working with young Chris Durang, aside from encouraging him and telling him he wasn’t deluded and that he was doing something valuable . . .

FEIFFER: I didn’t know how to teach at all. I didn’t go to college. But I had them bring in their plays, I cast the plays among the students, we read the plays, and we sat around and talked about what worked and what didn’t work and what could have been strengthened, where the story went. [I would read the plays we were going to talk about] on the train up to New Haven. To figure out how I was going to be smart about them and what I would have to say. And also, I’d have an essay point or two in my mind to make in relation to the play and theatre in general. While we had these plays to talk about, that went very well. There was some good stuff being done. 

[The practice Feiffer describes above for his ’70s Yale playwriting class sounds very much like the way George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) worked in his famous 47 Workshop at Harvard in the 1900s.  See my friend Kirk Woodward’s discussion of this program, the first such course in a U.S. university, in “Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist (Part 1)” (27 February 2025) and “Part 2” (2 March 2025).]

And then we ran out of plays. And [then] there was a lot of complaining going on about the School and the way they were being treated. And there was a lot to complain about. To get a play on, you had to find a director in the director program to do the play. Or you would not get a play on. And I thought that was outrageous. I thought that was inexcusable.

SWEET: So the directors were deciding what did and didn’t get on.

FEIFFER: I heard enough of this and finally I went to Howard Stein [1922-2012; supervisor of the Playwriting Program at Yale; playwright, essayist, and editor], who was running things while Brustein was in London, and I said to him, “This is bullshit. These guys are here to see their work done and the only way they can learn is to see their work on stage.” And he said, “No, they are going to have to work in the professional theatre and this is a way of teaching them about the real world . . . [.]” Howard, who never had a job outside of the academy in his life, was telling me, who had never worked in the academy, what the real world was like, and he had not a clue. I lost all respect for the whole operation. 

SWEET: So you did it one year?

FEIFFER: One semester. 

And in addition, because I was too busy being their friend, I couldn’t get these guys to write assignments.

They would bring in nothing. Because I was too busy being their buddy, I didn’t have the wherewithal to lay down the law and say: either get this in by next week or you guys are flunking. The next time I taught, which was at Northwestern [University; Evanston, Illinois], I thought, “How do I do this differently?” And the first thing was: don’t be their friend. I’m their teacher, not their friend. That means I can be a nice guy and I can be helpful when I can, but I can’t be good old Jules. Because they will take advantage of it just as your children take advantage. That was an important lesson to learn. Be as helpful as you know how to be, be as friendly as you know how to be, but make it clear: this is what you do, and if you don’t do it, you have no business being in this class.

SWEET: What was the official title of the Northwestern class?

FEIFFER: It was a humor writing class, which involved them writing a one-act play, just as I do now at Stony Brook Southampton [a campus of Stony Brook University in Southampton, Long Island, New York; part of the State University of New York (SUNY)]. At the end of the semester, I have them write a one act play, but up until then I have humor pieces, which are based on whatever idea I come up with. I want them to get outside the voice they normally wrote in. [A voice] is a good thing to have, but it also becomes a trap because you think it’s the only way you know how to write or can write. You become secure in that, and therefore, instead of it being an advantage, it can easily become a disadvantage because it leaves you terrified of doing anything else. 

So, the first thing I have them do, because it’s humor writing and humor is often about victimization . . . [.] Somebody has done something you take great umbrage at—not anything major—but you are very pissed off about it. Write about that, either in the first or third person, but write about that. And then we read it in class and talk about it. And I say, “For the next assignment, you’re the other person. And you write from the point of view of the person who did something to you.” It turns them topsyturvy and they have to have another argument and another voice, and they have to start thinking in a different way.

SWEET: Can you talk about specific responses that interested you?

FEIFFER: The students I used to have in the first six or seven years of the class [in Southampton] were often the beaten-up dregs of society who had gone into self-exile in Southampton. They were broken by drugs or marriage or divorce, some had been in jail, and they all had stories. And they all had a level of motivation and determination about them. But they all had stories. And I helped them tell their stories and put perspective on their stories by giving them humor. I really felt as if I was making a contribution. I really felt as I never felt doing a comic strip. Readers [would say] “how much you’ve helped me” and I never believed any of it. But I could see the results here. I could see the difference in how somebody wrote in a month or so, and it had to do with what I was doing. I thought, “For one of the few times in my life, I’m doing some good here.” And I loved it. 

But after a while the students became more the middle class: nice twenty-year-olds from middle class homes who had gone to NYU [New York University] or the New School [university in New York’s Greenwich Village; formerly the New School for Social Research] or Columbia [University[ or Hunter [College; part of the City University of New York (CUNY)], hadn’t had that much happen to them, and who didn’t have stories, and weren’t that interesting. And I couldn’t alter that much, and I ended up not caring that much about them. So that’s why I stopped after this year doing that class and starting a graphic novel class. We’ll see how that goes.

[Feiffer doesn’t say when this change occurred, but he seems to have started at Southampton in 1997, when the school was part of Long Island University.  In 2006, a year after LIU had closed the campus, it was purchased by the State University of New York, which served a different segment of the population, both national and statewide.  (LIU’s student body comes largely from the New York metropolitan area, including New York City and Long Island. One of its two main campuses, the original college, is in Brooklyn, which is at the western end of Long Island; the other is in Brookville, Long Island, in Nassau County.)  I wonder if this was partly responsible for the shift in student type Feiffer was seeing in his classes.]

Being a writer comes out of need. I need to write. I need to write because I need to put things down because I need, even if I don’t understand what it is, to say whatever it is that’s making me do this. Or I need to paint, or [make other] art. I need to get this out of me. I’m not even sure what it is I’ve got to get out. In those early students, I found that need. In the later ones, it’s more an exercise in a writing class would be run [sic; ‘fun’?], let’s see what it’s like.

I had one 55-year-old Irish woman from Queens in the class who was the oldest one there, who had a checkered family background. She was writing everything from what she knew. She could be very funny and very crazy and overwrought, and she was a pain in the ass. She’d get mad at me and she and I would get into fights in front of the class. But she was a real writer and she had things that she had to get out. And I loved her. She was wonderful.

[The New York City borough of Queens (also a county with the same name) is on Long Island between Brooklyn (Kings County) and Nassau County. Both Southampton and Stony Brook are in Suffolk County, the easternmost division of Long Island.]

Look, anybody with a brain knows, “There’s so much that I don’t know, that I have to figure out.” If you’re an artist, you’re obsessed with finding a way through, not to the answer—although you may fool yourself into thinking that there is one—but to something that completes the puzzle a little bit. At least enough to stop haunting you for a couple of minutes before you go on to the next part of the puzzle. And that’s what artists do. That’s what painters do. That’s what composers do. That’s what writers do. And if there’s not that need to do that, I don’t know why you’re doing it. 

[Jules Feiffer (1929-2025) was a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, and once the most widely-read satirist in the country.  The author of over 35 books, plays, and screenplays, Feiffer established his career in the 1950s as a staff cartoonist for The Village Voice.  His wit and diversity of talent earned him an Academy Award for his animated short film Munro (1961), the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, a place in the Comic Book Hall of Fame, and the Dramatists Guild’s own Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.  He joined the Dramatists Guild in 1966 and was elected to the Guild’s Council in 1970.

[Jeffrey Sweet was a resident writer at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, where they produced more than a dozen of his plays, winning Chicago’s Jeff Award, two Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards (American Theatre Critics Association), and the Audelco Award.  Jeff directed his play The Value of Names in London (Hint of Lime Productions in association with ANDTheatre Company, White Bear Theatre, 11 February-1 March 2025), and his play A Change of Position débuted at New Jersey Rep (New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, New Jersey; 11 December 2023). His book The Dramatist’s Toolkit (Heinemann, 1993) is in use as a text in a number of playwriting programs.]