The Red Letter Plays: 'In the Blood'

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Residency One tenure has extended from its start in the 2016-17 season at the Signature Theatre Company (The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, reported on 1 December 2016, and Venus, 7 Jun 2017) into the company’s 2017-18 season, which just got underway.  Parks’s final entry in her residency (she will be followed by Stephen Adly Guirgis, whose first Signature production will be Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, which I’m booked to see on 27 October with a report to follow) is comprised of two plays drawn from the same source material, though they were composed separately and are vastly different in nearly all respects. 

Under the umbrella title of “The Red Letter Plays,” STC’s presenting In the Blood and Fucking A, both inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter.  (If you’ve never read The Scarlet Letter, which isn’t necessary to respond to Parks’s riffs, I’ll let you look it up on your own.  For now, it’ll suffice to say that in the novel, set in Puritan Boston in the 1640s, Hester Prynne, married to a man believed lost at sea, has a daughter whose father she refuses to name.  She’s cast out of the community and forced to wear a red letter A for “Adulteress” embroidered on the bodice of her dress.)  Both plays, which have never been produced together before, have as their lead character a woman named Hester who lives on the margins of society.  (This is also the first time that the Signature Theatre Company has presented two plays by the same writer simultaneously.)  Together, In the Blood (not to be confused with the 2014 action-adventure film of that title from Anchor Bay Films) and Fucking A speak about motherhood, fatherhood, and family; class, the injustice of the social system, and the struggle to survive against a stacked deck.  Both plays, too, are modern-day tragedies that depict a devastating story and end with a wrenching and disturbing final action.

I’ve seen a number of Parks plays now, and though both of these two are quite different from what I’ve become accustomed to (and, as I’ll remark in my next report, Fucking A is even more distinctive), there are still clear marks of her dramaturgy evident here, especially her use of language which, as always, is unique, startling, and exciting.   In addition, I was astonished at the breadth and depth of the playwright’s imagination, as I have been at every Parks play I’ve seen.  If the truth be told, I can’t begin to understand how this artist conceives of the ideas she uses to make her plays.

The STC production of In the Blood, directed by Sarah Benson (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s OBIE-winning An Octoroon at the Soho Repertory Theatre in 2014 and the Theatre for a New Audience in 2015), began previews in the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, the small proscenium house at the company’s Pershing Square Signature Center, on 29 August 2017 and opened on 17 September; the revival will close on 15 October (after a week’s extension from 8 October) and my friend Kirk Woodward and I saw it at the 7:30 performance on 19 September.  The play, a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, premièred under the direction of David Esbjornson at the Joseph Papp Public Theater on 22 November 1999 (with Charlayne Woodard as Hester) and was subsequently presented at the Edison Theater in Los Angeles in July 2003 and the Schaeberle Studio Theatre at New York City’s Pace University in the fall of 2004.  Both plays are published in The Red Letter Plays from the Theatre Communications Group (2001):

Parks explains in a program note that the birth of the Red Letter Plays came around 1997 when she was canoeing with a friend, and they were singing songs and making conversation.  Parks remembers saying, “I’m going to write a riff on The Scarlet Letter and I’m going to call it Fucking A!”  She thought it was a funny idea—but she’d never read Hawthorne’s novel.  So the playwright read the book and began writing.  She wrote a draft of a play about Hester and when she finished, she realized that it wasn’t working.  She wrote several more drafts, “trying to find the story.” 

Parks described the riff she was trying to do on Scarlet Letter as “a contrafact, if you know jazz.  You take the chords [of an already-existing composition] and you write your own melody.”  Still, it “wasn’t coming together.”  She wrote more drafts.  She sat at her computer and deleted everything but the title, Fucking A.  Then she says she “heard this voice saying, ‘I’ll tell you the story of your play.’”  

The voice continued: “‘A woman with five children by five different lovers, that’s your play, and the children and the adults in the play are played by the same adult actors.’  And I was like, ‘that doesn’t sound like Fucking A.’  And the voice, a woman’s, was like, ‘No, it’s not.  It’s called In the Blood.’”

After that, Parks recounts, she found it very easy to write Fucking A.  

It was as if they were twins in the womb of my consciousness, twins in my mind.  And one couldn’t get out because they were entangled together.  So when In the Blood came out easily, then Fucking A was very easy to write.  They’re sisters, these two plays.  Both asking that question that I seem to keep asking in my work: “Who are you to me?”  And out of that questioning, hopefully, will come an understanding.

(There is a brief biographical profile of Parks in my report on The Death of the Last Black Man, as well as a discussion of the importance of jazz to her work.)

The play’s performed at Signature as a two-hour one-act of nine scenes (plus a Prologue), though In the Blood’s published text indicates an intermission after Scene 4.  The unmarried Hester, La Negrita (Saycon Sengbloh), has five children of varying races—Jabber (Michael Braun), Hester’s oldest son, aged 13; Bully (Jocelyn Bioh), her oldest daughter, 12; Trouble (Frank Wood), her middle son, 10; Beauty (Ana Reeder), her youngest daughter, 7; and Baby (Russell G. Jones), her youngest son, 2—each from a different father, none of whom acknowledges his relationship with Hester, much less his paternity of any of Hester’s children.  

The destitute family of six make their home under a bridge, where Jabber tries to teach his mother to read and write as she goes hungry so that her children can eat.  Hester’s illiterate—she gets Jabber to read things for her, including the pejorative graffiti scrawled on the bridge abutment—and so far, she’s mastered the letter A, which she chalks shakily on the same bridge structure—an unmistakable allusion to Hester Prynne and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.  Her friend Amiga Gringa (Reeder), a poor white neighbor who visits the family often, offers useless help; Amiga tells Hester her “first love,” Chilli (Braun), Jabber’s father, is back in town and is looking for her.  Amiga, a kind of street hustler who’ll do anything to get “a leg up,” suggest, too, that one of the fathers of Hester’s children might offer her some help.  As the children come home, they disappear under the set floor (between the floor of the set and the stage proper), which represents the shelter of their home, and while Amiga and Hester are talking, the Doctor (Wood), a road-side physician to the street people, passes through wearing his self-advertising sandwich board.  

Others who are part of Hester’s world of the streets are the Welfare Lady (Bioh), a representative of the state who’s married with children and living a prosperous, comfortable life, and Reverend D. (Jones), a neighborhood street preacher (and former alcoholic street-dweller himself) who’s on the verge of having his own church.  Reverend D. (a reference to the character Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne’s lover in The Scarlet Letter) is two-year-old Baby’s father, though he’s never acknowledged it, and we learn as each member of Hester’s little community has a scene with her and a “Confession” (which Ben Brantley of the New York Times aptly called “monologues of self-justification”) that they’ve all engaged in some kind of sexual relationship with her: the Doctor, Amiga Gringa, and the Welfare Lady, who, with her husband, had a one-time three-way with Hester. 

(Hester’s designation, La Negrita, is a polysemous locution.  It literally means ‘little black girl’ and can be no more than descriptive.  Apparently, it’s usually applied as a term of affection or endearment among Latin Americans, depending somewhat on nationality, but it can be derogative in some contexts.  The word negrita also has a second meaning of ‘bold,’ in reference to typeface, and that sense of bravery or strength carries over as well.  [Obviously from this characterization, Hester’s played by an African-American actress; other characters need not be any particular race or ethnicity except Welfare, who’s also a black woman, and Amiga Gringa, who’s Caucasian.]  The actors playing the children are all adults.  Parks calls for these five actors each to portray two characters—Hester is the only character who’s not double-cast—one child and one adult.  They also make up the chorus who appear at the beginning and end of the play to torment Hester.

(During the performance, I began thinking that each of Hester’s children are played by the same actors who play their fathers—with Bully played by Bioh, who’s also Welfare, whose husband is presumably Bully’s father.  We know from the text about Chilli/Jabber and the Reverend D./Baby.  But then, who’s Beauty’s father?  She’s played by Reeder, who portrays Amiga Gringa—who had a fling with Hester, too, but couldn’t have sired a child.  Of course, I could just be wrong—or is this something we’re just not supposed catch?  I kind of like the symmetry—except that it may just be imaginary.  The 5/5 cast of characters is certainly an issue of practical playwriting; but the assignment of the doubling, if it falls the way I thought—with whatever explanation arises for Beauty/Amiga Gringa—could be thematically significant, at least subliminally.  [The published script and the on-line casting breakdown in Back Stage specify this pairing, but have nothing more to say on the matter of paternity.])

Amiga’s news about Chilli (the name refers to Roger Chillingworth, the name Hester Prynne’s husband takes when he, like Chilli—who’s also taken a new name—reappears) seems to promise help, and when he arrives, he plays their song (“The Looking Song,” written by Parks) on a tape recorder and offers her marriage.  But when Hester’s four other children start coming home, he quickly withdraws the proposal and abandons her once again.  Indeed, everyone who purports to offer Hester help is really just betraying her and using her for their own gratification and selfish needs: Amiga, who’s essentially been stealing from her all along anyway, suggests Hester perform a sex show she’ll call Chocolate and Vanilla with her; Welfare has a job for Hester—sewing piecework—and suggests that Hester have a hysterectomy—a “spay,” Welfare calls it, like for a stray dog—and threatens to have her children taken away so she’ll “never see them again”; the Doctor also wants to remove Hester’s “womanly parts” (his eye chart—which Hester can’t read—spells out “SPAY”) and examines her like a mechanic checking under a car, sliding between her legs and beneath her dress on a dolly.  Finally, Reverend D. refuses to take any responsibility for Hester or Baby, stringing her along with empty promises and finally telling her not to come around any more. 

At the beginning of the play, vandals had graffiti’d “SLUT” on the supports of the bridge, but Jabber had told his mother he couldn’t read the words.  At the end of the play, Jabber admits he had refused to read the word for her because “It was a bad word”—the word that for Hester, La Negrita is what “Adulteress” is for Hester Prynne: a label of outsiderness.  Once having said the word, however, Jabber keeps repeating it until Hester strikes out in a rage and beats her son to death.  In the blood of her son, she scrawls the letter A on the ground before the bars of a prison cell come down and enclose her.  The voices of the community chorus show no sympathy for Hester, concluding the brutal drama with no hint of mercy. 

In the Blood, the first of the two Red Letter Plays, is considered to be the demarcation between Parks’s thoroughly poeticized and anti-realistic scripts like The Death of the Last Black Man (1990) and Venus (1996) and a move toward Realism, or at least a sort of Brechtian Realism.  The play still has many distancing characteristics, including choral scenes, the spoken-aria-like Confessions, poetic use of language, scene labels (for the Confessions), music and song, and others—not the least of which is the casting of adult actors to play little children.  As you’ve seen, except for Hester and Chilli, none of the characters has an actual name; Reverend D. comes closest, but the rest only have descriptive labels.  In fact, three of them, the Doctor, Welfare, and Reverend D. are clearly representatives of the societal structures that neglect and oppress Hester and those like her: the medical establishment, the state, and religion.  Not even Hester’s children have real names; they’re almost allegorical. 

In addition, Louisa Thompson’s scenic design is in line with the playwright’s description of the setting as “spare,  to reflect the poverty of the world of the play.”  It’s only vaguely realistic, suggesting an actual bridge abutment without reproducing one.  Aside from this suggestion, Thompson’s set is more an environment for the actors to work in than a visual image to orient the audience.  One naturalistic touch is the big, yellow chute that brings garbage and construction debris down from above at intervals—some of which refuse become the children’s playthings.  The floor of the set, constructed above the stage floor, is severely raked and the rear “wall” is sloped like a giant slide—down which the children slide from a catwalk above, representing the street level.  That slope is a metaphor for the plight of Hester and her family, though: the children can slide down it, but there’s no way to climb up the wall (as Sengbloh observes in an interview); it’s absolutely Sisyphean—like Hester’s life.

This calls  for some non-naturalistic physical performance, directed by Elizabeth Streb.  (Other physical performance elements were in the charge of choreographer Annie-B Parson and fight director J. David Brimmer.)  The stark lighting design of Yi Zhao and the sound designer of Matt Tierney blends with this scheme as well, with moody and slightly noirish effect.

Hester has been rejected by the system with no possibility for redemption because she’s poor, black, and homeless.  Her fate is in her blood, society had concluded.  But beyond race and even social status, by connecting each child to a father and painting that father (or his surrogate, as in the case of Welfare) in defining colors, Parks asks what is “in the blood”?  What is innate and what is imposed by societal forces (that is, prejudices and assumptions)?  Because Parks has universalized the saga by drawing on a classic piece of literature, setting the play “Here” and “Now,” giving most of the characters descriptions and labels rather than names, and casting them from all races and genders, the message is that this fate applies to all in Hester’s situation not just one person called Hester, La Negrita.  In the Blood is a class-action indictment.

As Hester, Saycon Sengbloh manages to make a woman who doesn’t seem to be able to control her own life, much less her destiny, sympathetic, even down to the awful act she perpetrates in the end.  Sengbloh exhibits a certain resilience in the face of her destitution, but her Hester believes the lies she tells herself.  She’s almost Candide, but with a dash more cynicism: the world she inhabits isn’t the best of all possible worlds, but she’s doing the best she possibly can in it.  Neither Sengbloh nor Parks condescends to Hester: she’s no saint or pitiable, misunderstood soul.  She’s a survivor who’ll do (and does) unapologetically whatever’s necessary to keep herself and her children going—and that’s what the actress plays..

The five members of the ensemble are all excellent, making distinct personalities for both their adult and child characters, each one a different individual.  The adults are already cold and selfish, each in his or her own way, and the children are beginning to show the signs of where they could be going, as Bioh’s 12-year-old Bully sleeps with her hands clenched into little fists and the 10-year-old Trouble of Wood has stolen a cop’s truncheon (with which his mother later beats Jabber to death).  But these actors really play three roles since they’re also the Greek chorus that represents the community that judges Hester and finds her unworthy.  These five are the five-fingered hand that Hester sees blocking out the sun, the dark shadow she says is the hand of fate—Hester’s fate.

On the basis of 23 published reviews, Show-Score calculated an average rating of 79 for Signature’s In the Blood.  The tally of positive notices was 91%, with the highest scores two 90’s (including Broadway World) and eight 85’s (among them, the New York Times and New York magazine/Vulture), 5% mixed reviews, and 4% negative, represented by a single notice with a score of 40 (scribicide).  My review survey will include 16 notices.  (A number of reviewers covered both play in one notice, as if the Red Letter Plays were being presented as a two-play rep.  This makes it hard to summarize those reviews as they pertain specifically to each play—but I’ll give it a try.)

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness described Parks’s play as “as bleak and unredeeming as Hawthorne’s novel” but added that its “bursts of theatrical energy ensure that In the Blood’s social critique never feels heavy-handed.”  In the Blood “remains topical” and “never flirts with sentimentality.”  Sengbloh, said McGuinness, plays Hester “with consummate understatement” and “the hypocritical bromides of evangelical Christianity prove a rich source of satire thanks to Russell G. Jones’s pompous yet insecure” Reverend D.  Director Benson, the FT reviewer declared, “creates a winningly anarchic atmosphere full of offbeat comic touches.”

Barbara Schuler of Long Island’s Newsday stated in her “Bottom Line” that “Parks delivers powerful riffs on ‘The Scarlet Letter.’”  Schuler’s review was an omnibus notice covering both Red Letter Plays, so her assessment of In the Blood consisted of the judgment that Hester is “played with a driving force by” Sengbloh and the description that a “better life seems momentarily within her grasp, and when that hope is dashed, there’s unspeakable tragedy.”  Of both plays, which she labels “powerful pieces,” the Newsday review-writer observed that “they’re about mothers, and the choices—sometimes excruciatingly terrible choices—they must make to protect their children from all that life throws at them.  Any mother will relate.” 

Matt Windman wrote in am New York that both In the Blood and Fucking A “are packed with ominous tones, intense emotions, freewheeling theatricality, social criticism and an inevitable sense of tragedy.”  In the Blood “is the more serious and sensitive of the two plays,” however. “In spite of some slow patches,” caviled Windman, naming the Confessions specifically, Benson’s staging “has a scorching brutality, which grows in intensity as the play heads to its violent climax.”  Both Signature productions, the amNY reviewer asserted, are “outstanding staging[s] of a bold, difficult and provocative work.  When viewed together, ‘The Red Letter Plays’ proves to be one of the most interesting and rewarding theater events of the fall.”

In the Times, Brantley declared, “Tragedy stalks Hester La Negrita . . . as relentlessly as it does the doomed queens of Euripides and Racine.”  Calling the play a “genre-mutating” drama, Brantley labeled the Signature mounting a “first-rate revival” staged “with finely measured restraint and a dangerously relaxing sense of humor” with Hester enacted with “exquisitely clouded radiance” by Sengbloh.  The Timesman asserted that “this enduringly fresh work” plays “craftily . . . with theatrical traditions and the expectations that come with them.”  The performances are “both subtly stylized and naturalistic enough for us to identify the characters as people we know,” said Brantley, and though it “may sound like agitprop,” the director “reins in the hectoring and melodrama.”  (The Times reviewer had one complaint: he doubted that “the sexual element in two of the monologues is either necessary or convincing.”) 

Hilton Als of the New Yorker, characterizing the two plays as “masterpieces of the form,” asserted that Parks “shows how pain wears on [both Hesters], but also how they outwit life—which is to say a life that is dominated by male-generated puritanism.”  Als observed that he didn’t see the original New York productions of these plays, but he had read them and “ was amazed . . . by Parks’s gift for theatrical synthesis” in the way she melds her diverse influences and makes the combination her own.  (Als names Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare.)  He posited, however:

There’s a great gulf in the mind between reading a play and seeing it, and I wonder if the disappointment I felt at both shows had to do with how I’d first imagined these essential works—and how far short of that these productions fell.  Perhaps the greatness of Parks’s language shut the directors out, before they even got started.  There isn’t a lot of air in her scripts, and I can see how an actor could feel cowed by them. 

The New Yorker reviewer found that “Parks’s complicated view of motherhood—is it fulfillment or destruction, biology or destiny, liberation or prison, or all these things?—isn’t played out enough.” 

For Vulture/New York magazine, Sara Holdren dubbed the Signature revival of In the Blood a “powerful production” and declared that “we never forget that we are grappling with the particular horrors of the here and now, facing down the specific breed of resentment and contempt this society reserves for women of color.”  In the play, and its companion piece (which I’ll cover next week), Holdren asserted that “Parks rages incisively, articulately, and sometimes even humorously against the capitalist machine that grinds these women down.”  Director Benson and the “skillful design team have brought the harsh texture and soundscape” of the city streets onto the stage as the “intelligent and versatile actors are by turns exuberant, touching, and even a little menacing.”  Sengbloh’s performance is “both innocent and frightening—and finally, devastating” as she “brings a cheerful, loving determination to Hester that makes . . . her story all the more heart-wrenching.”  The plays “may be almost 20 years old,” observed the woman from New York, “but make no mistake, the productions currently playing at Signature are proof that these stories belong to our world, right now, today.”  She warned, “They’re not easy to watch, but they’re vital, scrappy, angry, witty, articulate.”  Holdren acknowledged, however: “If this sounds grim, trust me, there’s humor here as well. . . .  Parks is canny—she knows that laughter opens up the ribs so that later you can slip the knife in.” 

In the Blood “seizes you from the get-go,” wrote Raven Snook in Time Out New York, with “a simmering Saycon Sengbloh.”  The play, Snook observed, is “even more relevant” today than it was in 1999, and “[i]ts urgency is heightened by director Sarah Benson’s relentless pace . . . and the ensemble cast’s unfettered performances.”  The TONY review-writer’s conclusion?  “Parks’s scathing indictment of how society treats impoverished women gets your pulse pumping even as it breaks your heart.”  In Variety, Marilyn Stasio reported that Sengbloh “gives a remarkable performance as Hester.” 

Elyse Sommer dubbed the Red Letter Plays “terrific productions” with Hester “played with great passion” by Sengbloh.  Labeling the play “very raw,” Sommer cautioned, “While In the Blood has its comic moments, what it’s definitely not about is light entertainment.”  The CU reviewer added that In the Blood is “an unremittingly dark and hopeless tale and yet, there's something poetically gut-wrenching” in its telling.  Sommer concluded that “while Hester’s story remains downbeat,” In the Blood “is a stirring, highly recommended theatrical experience.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Howard Miller called Signature’s In the Blood “stunning” and reported that it “grabs you by the throat from the moment it begins and does not let up.”  The play, “brilliantly helmed” by Benson, “hits all of the marks and absolutely makes the case for why the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parks is considered to be one of our great contemporary playwrights.” 

Brian Scott Lipton of Theater Pizzazz labeled Benson’s In the Blood at STC “first-rate” with an “extraordinary” Sengbloh who “never shies away from the play’s most difficult moments.”  On scribicide, Aaron Botwick (in the lowest-rated review on Show-Score) begrudged that the production “looks great,” with its “exquisite set,” but “the emotional wallop in the text never materializes onstage.”  Botwick pointed out that “Parks is working in the tradition of Brecht, which has a tendency toward flat execution.”  The scribicide review-writer feels “that eliciting empathy from the audience highlights and focuses metatheatrical alienation rather than distracting from it: cold derives its meaning from heat, distance from closeness.”  He asserted that “we only see Hester from very far away, we only hear her in monotone.  When the curtain falls, she is covered in the blood of her favorite child.  I felt nothing,” he complained.

Michael Dale, noting that In the Blood is “more sensitive” than its sister play, pronounced in Broadway World that it “receives a solid remounting” at STC.  In the Blood “takes on the style of Greek tragedy,” reported Dale, “though, especially in director Sarah Benson’s production, reality is raised to near-absurdist proportions.”  Sengbloh’s performance is “heart-tugging,” and the BWW reviewer asserted, “With America's current leaders looking to severely limit the government assistance made available to people like Hester, IN THE BLOOD has sadly lost none of it's relevance.”  Zachary Stewart of TheaterMania dubbed the production a ”searing revival” under the “steady direction” of Benson, guiding an “excellent” cast.  Sengbloh plays Hester “with a steely determination that immediately makes us root for her.”  In the end, Stewart remarked, “You may find In the Blood dystopian, but is it really so far off?”

On TheaterScene.net, Joel Benjamin proclaimed that, no matter how you feel about Parks’s  work, the Red Letter Plays “certainly deserve attention.” Benjamin, however, found himself “conflicted about these plays.”  Parks, he acknowledged:

is brilliant at generating fire with the source of the heat difficult to pinpoint.  It’s her talent to write dramas which sizzle, constructed in her strange vernacular, yet somehow leave too many questions unanswered, the better to prove her one-sided stories.

In both the Red Letter Plays, Benjamin complained, Parks avoids “revealing or analyzing the two Hesters’ inner lives which is Parks’ major weakness as a playwright.”  Though he found In the Blood’s Hester “played heroically and passionately” by Sengbloh, The TheaterScene review-writer had qualms.  “Colorful language?” he asked. “Yes.  Memorable characters?  Check.  Motivation?  Not so much.”  Nevertheless, Benjamin concluded, Benson “turns In the Blood into a chamber opera” and watching Sengbloh “resourcefully taking every blow and not fall apart is excitingly satisfying.”  Stanford Friedman, dubbing the play a “captivating revival” on New York Theater Guide, found “moments of playfulness that feel like 1960’s improvisational theater, sexually frank monologues that would be at home in the 1980s, a clear feminist political agenda . . . and, conversely, a touch of musical comedy.”  And, Friedman added, “There is also a healthy dose of absurdity.”  He called Hester “a slowly ticking time bomb,” played by Sengbloh in a “finely measured performance.” 

"In Conversation: Lynn Nottage & Paula Vogel"

by Tari Stratton

[This interview with playwrights Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel, who both made long-awaited Broadway débuts this past season (Sweat at Studio 54, 26 March-25 June 2017, and Indecent at the Cort Theatre, 18 April-6 August 2017, respectively), was originally published in the May/June issue of The Dramatist (Vol. 19, No. 5.5), the publication of the Dramatists Guild of America, the stage writers’ professional association.  (Kirk Woodward, who’s a member of DGA, brought the interview to my attention.)  The two dramatists have known each other for several decades as Vogel was Nottage’s playwriting professor and mentor at Brown University in the 1980s.  “In Conversation: Lynn Nottage & Paula Vogel” is a “DPS Profile,” a project of the Dramatists Play Service script publisher.]

TARI STRATTON: My first question for you is a little selfish: are you as mad as I am that it’s taken so long to get you two on Broadway? It ticks me off. Obviously, I’m so happy it’s happening now, but hello. That’s probably rude, sorry.

PAULA VOGEL: Well, you know, I’m looking at the experience as being fun and funny, because the truth of the matter is to sustain ourselves-for how long? How many decades? You can’t think about Broadway. You have to get up every morning and be thankful for the artists you’re working with. You have to be happy that you write the next first draft. You have to be happy that the artists you love are working with you and going forward as well.

And if we stop and think about Broadway, what we’re going to feel is exclusion and bitterness. There is, I think, nothing worse than feeling bitter to extinguish the creative spark.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I was going to say something similar: we can’t let bitterness be our guiding light because, otherwise, we’ll accomplish nothing. And so, like Paula, I don’t spend my days thinking about Broadway as the end game.

Of course, throughout the season I will go to Broadway and experience little fits of frustration and anger, but on a day-to-day basis, I’m really focused on my work: trying to generate interesting plays, trying to reach an audience that I want to engage with.

A lot of times [that audience] is not necessarily the audience that’s on Broadway. But now that I’m there . . . [Laughter] . . . I’m sort of giddy and excited tobe making art on a larger scale. Today, sitting in Studio 54 rehearsing the play and looking at the number of seats, Iwas thinking about the rich history of that space-it was a television studio, then a very infamous nightclub, and now it has been reclaimed as a theatre. I just felt there’s so much life that has moved through that theatre, and I feel proud to to be part of that history.

PAULA VOGEL: That’s right.

LYNN NOTTAGE: And that was really exciting to me.

PAULA VOGEL: I don’t know about you, Lynn, [but] for me the significant moment was getting the Pulitzer. [Vogel was a Pulitzer Prize-winner in 1998 for How I Learned to Drive.] It was significant, but not in the way that people think. I mean, I think it made the people who love me happy. They were always proud, and they always loved me. The thing that the Pulitzer made a little easier to do was go into the next faculty meeting and say, “We have to raise money for fellowships for emerging playwrights.” I mean, what I think it gave me – I don’t know if this is true – was the ability to have people think a little more, “Well, maybe she knows what she’s talking about.”

LYNN NOTTAGE: I think this is true of Broadway, and I also think it’s true of getting a prize like the Pulitzer. [Nottage won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Ruined, which also won the 2009 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the 2009 Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, the 2009 OBIE Award for Best New American Play, the 2009 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, the 2010 Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play, and the 2009 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play. She won a second Pulitzer in 2017 for Sweat] It gives you a certain level of visibility, because, as female artists, we’re often grappling with our relative invisibility, though we’re writing at the same level as our male counterparts but, somehow, we’re not seen and valued in the same way. And I think the Pulitzer Prize allowed me to step out of the shadows and into a little bit of the light. Suddenly, my phone began ringing in ways that it hadn’t rung before. I was invited to sit on panels. I was invited to speak at universities. And subsequently, theaters were much more interested in producing my plays. So, Broadway and the Pulitzer Prize translated into exposure and access to new stages, it amplified my voice.

PAULA VOGEL: Absolutely. But I would – and it sounds really corny – I would say that being able to be in a joyful process is actually more important, because I then want to keep writing.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I think that we’re really fortunate that we’re entering Broadway at a key moment, because we’re entering it with trusted collaborators.

PAULA VOGEL: Yes.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I’m working with [stage director] Kate Whoriskey, who has been my collaborator for many years.

PAULA VOGEL: That’s been phenomenal.

LYNN NOTTAGE: And it’s really important that we’re taking this journey together. And I think it’s true of you and [director] Rebecca [Taichman, Tony-winner for Indecent].

PAULA VOGEL: Seven-year process, yeah.

LYNN NOTTAGE: It’s relatively scary to enter into a commercial space for the first time, but I feel supported because I’m entering it with someone who I trust absolutely.

PAULA VOGEL: Same for me. I don’t know what people expect when they go to Broadway the first time. I don’t know that I have any expectations. I do know that I’m happy when the rehearsal begins. I’m happy when I see my cast members. I love that we all came together and that we’re all going together. And who knows what it means?

LYNN NOTTAGE: It’s true. And I also think there’s this daunting moment when you take your first step over the threshold into this big, famous space and think, “Oh, my God. How am I going to fill it?” And then you immediately get to work. You begin rehearsing, and you think, “Oh, I know how to do this. I’ve been doing this for the last 25 years, and I’m really prepared to do it.”

You realize it’s not any different than putting on theater in any space from community theatre to an off-Broadway theatre to a regional theatre. It’s just a larger stage. And I feel like we have been preparing for this for many years. So, in some ways, I don’t think it’s as daunting and scary as it would be if I were a younger playwright. I feel as though I’m arriving at the exact moment I’m prepared to meet the challenge.

PAULA VOGEL: You know, I can’t remember who told me this, like 35, 40 years ago, but a woman in our field said to me, “You always get prizes when you no longer need them.”

LYNN NOTTAGE: That’s true.

PAULA VOGEL: It really is true, which is like, you know, this is nice or as we say, Dayenu. This would be enough. [The word is Hebrew, commonly heard at Passover when a thousand-year-old song with that title is often sung as part of the Seder. The word means, as Vogel says, ‘it would have been enough’ and refers to the gratitude of the Jewish people to God for all the gifts He gave them, like delivering them from slavery, providing manna in the desert, and giving them the Torah, any one of which would have been enough.] This is nice. But I’m not risking my entire life on this one roll of the dice. It’s nice that I got it. And it’s funny that it feels like a combination bat mitzvah and wedding . . . in that it’s really the first time. It’s, like, how can you say to everybody that you’ve loved over 60 years, “Come and see me at the Vineyard.” I mean, you can’t fit those people in the Vineyard Theater [Off-Broadway company in Manhattan’s Flatiron District where Indecent had its New York City début in May-June 2016: searing capacity: 132; Studio 54 seats 1,006 and the Cort seats 1,082.]. So, for the first time, we could actually be in the same space.

LYNN NOTTAGE: That’s true. You can have everyone.

PAULA VOGEL: Yeah.

LYNN NOTTAGE: But my family’s very small, so the Vineyard Theater’s actually very perfect.[Laughs] I honestly don’t have that many people.[Laughs]

PAULA VOGEL: My family’s dead, but we say family in that other way.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Yes. It’s the extended family.

PAULA VOGEL: Yes.

LYNN NOTTAGE: You are right. It’s about the gifts that arrive at the most unexpected moments and when you don’t necessarily need them. But, I do feel that on some unconscious level, there’s a part of me that needed to take this step.

PAULA VOGEL: Yes.

LYNN NOTTAGE: And I can’t speak to why, because I’ve spent so much of my life saying it wasn’t important. But now that I’m there, I feel like it’s somehow filling some little hole [laughs] that always existed in my playwriting journey.

PAULA VOGEL: I might look at it a different way as someone who—it’s a strange thing—screamed more when [hearing] that you won the Pulitzer than I did for myself. I got much more pleasure out of it. And I feel that the theatre needs to take this step of having Lynn Nottage on Broadway because, otherwise, Broadway is not worth the price of the ticket.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Well, you know, it’s funny, because I feel the same way—I think about my journey in theater and who I believe belongs on that main stage, and it is astonishing to me that Paula Vogel has not been there. It feels as though you’ve been there. [Laughs]

PAULA VOGEL: Do people do that to you? They assume that you’ve been on Broadway?

LYNN NOTTAGE: How I Learned to Drive was a Broadway play in my mind. It occupies a large space. Without it [moving] uptown, in my mind it still occupies that space in terms of its importance. [Vogel’s Off-Broadway hit, How I Learned to Drive, premièred at the Century Center for the Performing Arts near New York City’s Union Square on 6 May 1997 and ran for 400 performances.  It won the 1996-97 New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play, the 1997 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the 1997 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play, the OBIE Award for playwriting for Vogel, the 1997 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play, the 1997 Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, and the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  The play was revived Off-Broadway in 2012 by the Second Stage Theatre, directed by Whoriskey.]

PAULA VOGEL: Right, likewise. And I’m sure people must come to you and go, “Lynn Nottage, the Broadway playwright,” in introducing you all the time, right? “Pulitzer Prize, professor at Columbia, Broadway playwright . . .”

LYNN NOTTAGE: Yeah. It’s an assumption.

PAULA VOGEL: I mean, you are in the canon.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I don’t think I’m there yet.

PAULA VOGEL: Well, let me redefine canon, because I think that that’s what this moment is doing: redefining what canon means. And I would say that, for me, as a teacher, and I’m sure this is true for you, canon is the writers who excite and influence emerging playwrights to write.

LYNN NOTTAGE: And it evolves.   

PAULA VOGEL: Yes, that’s what it does.

LYNN NOTTAGE: It really does evolve, because I think –

PAULA VOGEL: And you’re in the canon.

LYNN NOTTAGE: – you probably had this experience teaching, is that every eight years, I would say, the canon rotates. And there’s a whole other set of writers who excite young people. And I feel like sometimes I have to play catch-up, because I’m still back there holding onto the saints of my past, and there are new saints replacing them. It’s true. It’s dynamic.

PAULA VOGEL: Right. And at some point, I think I decided that because I was doing that, it’s not that I don’t want to catch up. I’m hungry. But I decided that the thing I can do is I can give young, emerging writers the writers that no one talks about anymore. I want to make sure that [playwright] Irene Fornes stays in the canon. I want to make sure that Funnyhouse of a Negro [play by Adrienne Kennedy (on which I reported in “Signature Plays” on 3 June 2016)] is read frequently. It’s those plays that –

LYNN NOTTAGE: That have to remain in circulation.

PAULA VOGEL: Exactly. Like Jane Bowles, In the Summer House.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Well, it’s remembering the ancestors and sort of continuing to pour that libation and not let them be forgotten.

PAULA VOGEL: I love that. It is remembering the ancestors.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I think that as women, it’s really important for us to do that.

PAULA VOGEL: It absolutely is.

TARI STRATTON: You two are amazing. May I throw you another question? Both of you have taken real people, but then sort of fictionalized them, you know, or taken real circumstances but then have created characters out of the circumstances. I was just interested in hearing more about that part of the process.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Sure. You know, what I think we’re doing is somewhat different in that I began my process by interviewing a lot of folks in Reading, Pennsylvania [where Sweat is set], which is a city that caught my attention. It was the poorest city in America in 2011, and I really was very interested in the way in which poverty was reshaping the American narrative. And I found myself gravitating to that space and wanting to interview as many people as possible. I had a need to understand.

I was not specifically looking for someone to write about, but looking for people who represented what I felt was happening to folks who lived in these post-industrial cities throughout the country. And so that’s where I began. My characters are really composites of many people, as opposed to being based on individuals, which I think is slightly different.

PAULA VOGEL: Right. It’s interesting, because when you describe that process, the last play that I worked on, I was making composites, particularly of women veterans. [Vogel is probably referring to Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia, 2014.] So that thing that you’re doing, I think, with Sweat, of trying to make composites, I think I’m in a different stance here in that I’m trying to resurrect the dead. And I do think that is a different process. I had to let go of worrying that they weren’t alive and able to defend themselves – do you know what I mean? And that I wouldn’t ever know them, because I would never meet them.

LYNN NOTTAGE: They weren’t going to knock on your door and say, “Shame on you, Paula Vogel. That’s not what I said.”

PAULA VOGEL: That’s right, exactly. It was – like, I’ll never forget I went to the first reading of [Anna Deavere Smith’s] Fires in the Mirror. And standing in line was everyone she performed.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Oh, interesting.

PAULA VOGEL: And it was such an amazing experience to hear the Jewish leader turning to the African American leader saying, “Oh, I thought she performed you much better than she did me.” [Laughter] And there was this harmony in the line, and I can imagine in Sweat, that all of these people –

LYNN NOTTAGE: We had the interesting experience after we closed at the Public [Theater in New York City, where Sweat débuted in New York City in 2016 after premièring at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015], of bringing Sweat to Reading, PA for a command performance—a very stripped-down production—for about 500 people.  [A staged reading was presented at the Miller Center for the Arts in Reading on 19 December 2016.] The actors were incredibly nervous. They knew that they weren’t necessarily portraying individuals who would be out there in the audience, but portraying individuals that the folks in the audience might recognize on a deeper level.

PAULA VOGEL: How was the response?

LYNN NOTTAGE: It was an overwhelming response. I think that the actors were so giddy when it finished and so stimulated by the questions and the responses, that it reinvigorated this next stage of production, because they knew that this play was supported by people in Reading and that it is truthful to the experience.

On some level, they thought they had been performing a fiction. Now they understand that they’re performing something other than fiction, which is different. And it was fun. And then afterwards, they all went to the bar that it was based on and stayed out much too late. [Laughter]

PAULA VOGEL: See, that’s wonderful. I’m getting more of a kind of piecemeal response, running into people, having people see the show who are survivors, who come forward and say, “My mother lived in Lodz,” or, “My grandmother was sent to the camp,” or—and this was terrifying—on three different occasions, Sholem Asch’s family has come to see it.– [Indecent is based on the controversial 1907 Yiddish drama God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, 1880-1957.]

LYNN NOTTAGE: I just was going to ask whether he had children and family that . . .

PAULA VOGEL: He has a granddaughter, who came to see it from London, and a great-grandson. We’ve had every remaining member come.

LYNN NOTTAGE: But they must be so thankful that you’ve resurrected this play. There’ll be a whole generation of people who will go and pick up God of Vengeance, because they saw your play.

PAULA VOGEL: Well, that’s what we want. Right. We want it to be taught.

LYNN NOTTAGE: And read. I think it is product placement. My first impulse after seeing the production, was, “I’ve seen that text, but I’ve never read it, and I feel like I have to sit down and read it now.”

PAULA VOGEL: It’s great. We wanted it back in the canon. Initially, people did come [see it and say], “I’m sorry. You got him completely wrong.” But these people belong to them in a very emotional way. And the same, you know, with the Yiddish. I don’t speak Yiddish.

LYNN NOTTAGE: You know, once I was listening to my brother describe my parents, and I thought, “Who are you describing? I don’t recognize those people.” We grew up in the same house, but we both have very different recollections and different relationships. [That] is what I think gives us permission to improvise when we’re writing. We all have a different perspective and point of view that we bring to our experiences.

PAULA VOGEL: I do think there’s a basic level of love that we’re both expressing, which is these people should be on stage in the light.

LYNN NOTTAGE: In the light.

PAULA VOGEL: Visible in the light. And I guess that’s the greatest demonstration of love we can give.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I think that’s true. I mean, I know that audiences—New York audiences in particular— are used to seeing certain kinds of folks represented on the stage. And I think that what both of us are doing are bringing people to the stage who don’t often get to tell their stories, because the powers that be haven’t deemed them worthy. I want to open up a new conversation with audiences, offer them a view of our culture that folks don’t often see on the stage. That’s part of what excites me. I know there are going to be people who think, “We don’t want to see these people.” And I’m like, “Fine, then don’t come.” But I think it’s very, very important.

Particularly—and I’m talking about politics now—in this day and age in which we have a president who’s really invested in dividing us, and who’s also invested in pushing people back into the shadows and creating a country that is not a country I necessarily want to live in. I think that it’s incumbent upon us as artists to really push back, to resist. We talk about being produced on Broadway, well I see this moment of being on Broadway as part of my resistance. I am occupying this large space for voices that are marginalized and need to be heard.

PAULA VOGEL: Yes. The other thing that I want to bring up, which I feel is in both of our plays and in both of our concerns, I don’t know if this is true for you, but my entire life—in theater, film and, television—I’ve been watching stories where I’m looking at the set, and going, “How do these people afford to live? What do they do for work? How did they come up with all of that money? How did they afford such a nice apartment as five friends? How did they end up living near Lincoln Center?” I can’t get over it. I just stare at the clothing. I’m like, “Oh, my God. That person is wearing clothing that would cost me a month of a salary.”

LYNN NOTTAGE: Wearing, like, $1,000 boots. [Laughs]

PAULA VOGEL: Yeah. How is that possible? And I remember—particularly in the 1970s—it felt like every play off-Broadway and on Broadway was about an elegant cocktail party that happened in a wonderful Manhattan apartment. And it’s not that I begrudge people having wonderful Manhattan apartments, but I just kind of sat there. It was a reason that in my youth—I’m trying to get over this—I’ve never been able to really encompass opera. As I was working my way through college, someone took me to an opera. And I looked at the stage, and I realized in a single ten-minute segment, $40,000 flashed across that stage, which would have paid my tuition for four years back then. And I got physically ill.

LYNN NOTTAGE: That’s not a good thing –

PAULA VOGEL: It’s not a good thing.

LYNN NOTTAGE: – to go to an opera and become ill.

PAULA VOGEL: Right, exactly, and be paying attention to that instead of . . . So, I struggled to get through it. But we’re in an interesting time right now, where we are presenting these plays [and] how much money does it take to do a Broadway production? Where is that coming from? Because right now, I feel like Sweat is making me pay attention to what is the cost and price of money. And that’s a different question when you [ask] what is the price of money for the people in this bar. That’s a very different question.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Well, my characters have a different relationship to money than some of the people that you see portrayed on stage in Manhattan, All of the plays are about survival on some level, but in many plays it’s about emotional survival. But in Sweat, it is also about the fundamental survival. It’s like, “Will we be able to feed ourselves in two weeks if we lose our jobs?”

PAULA VOGEL: Right. And in Indecent, it’s how many bodies do we have to get into the room, right? Ten bodies, twelve bodies, how many bodies can you squeeze into that space? Yeah, exactly.

LYNN NOTTAGE: But Indecent also is very much about censorship. What can be seen on the stage? You know, you look at the history of that play [God of Vengeance] and how something so simple and pure can be deemed dangerous–

PAULA VOGEL: Yes, that’s true.

LYNN NOTTAGE: – and how we, as artists, have to be really careful in this day and age, because these moments can return. We always say, “It can’t happen,” but it can happen.

PAULA VOGEL: Right. It absolutely can happen.

LYNN NOTTAGE: It can happen, and it can happen very quickly, as we’re seeing that the revolution – and when I use the word revolution, I’m not talking about a sort of a certain kind of rebellion, but a shifting of the sensibility and –

PAULA VOGEL: The turning.

LYNN NOTTAGE: – the turning of –

PAULA VOGEL: The turning of the wheel.

LYNN NOTTAGE: – a wheel, which is what is happening right now. And, unfortunately, it’s turning backward. So we have to be careful, and we have to protect the word.

PAULA VOGEL: Yeah, absolutely. It’s terrifying.

LYNN NOTTAGE: It is terrifying. You know, that list of what the president wants to cut out—National Endowment of Arts, National Endowment of Humanities, squeezing the EPA and squeezing out the state department and a lot of the programs that are really about servicing the poor and about enlightenment and what I feel represents the best of what America has to offer. It is who we are and these are the gifts that we can give, and you squeeze that out, and it’s like, then, who do we become?

PAULA VOGEL: The ability to have a long life is going to be something that only the ruling classes have.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Yeah, only the very wealthy.

PAULA VOGEL: That’s right. You know, all of the stories that we have of our parents and grandparents, where people died early and young—crushed at work, caught in the machinery, whatever—all of those regulations are being undone right now.

LYNN NOTTAGE: They’re going to be slowly stripped away, and you’ll see workers dying again. We’ll see women struggling to get abortions in back alleys. All the things that we take for granted will disappear, which is why we have to write.

PAULA VOGEL: Right. It’s an ironic thing: right at the moment that we’re finally reaching visibility, the field is endangered and it’s also the moment where it’s most important to write for theatre. Kind of funny.

LYNN NOTTAGE: It is kind of funny. And I think maybe that’s why we’re on Broadway now. Maybe it’s finally prepared to receive certain voices, because they’re necessary . . .

PAULA VOGEL: Yes.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Which is the optimistic view. [Laughs]

PAULA VOGEL: It’s also interesting. I think the past several decades, I’ve been feeling a kind of benign optimism that time was on our side, that demographically, the United States was shifting.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Well, it was shifting.

PAULA VOGEL: And that white nationalism was going to die out.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Now it’s panic. What we’re seeing is panic. And white panic is . . . a recognition that power balance is going to tip in the other way, and folks who’ve really enjoyed the white privilege are going to have to let it go. And, you know, you’ve probably heard me describe how white privilege has been the superpower, and the kryptonite is diversity.

PAULA VOGEL: Yes. That’s absolutely right. So, you still think time is on our side?

LYNN NOTTAGE: I do think it’s on our side. I think that this is the last gasp.

PAULA VOGEL: Oh, God, please.

LYNN NOTTAGE: But I think not only time is on our side. I think numbers ultimately will be on our side.

PAULA VOGEL: Yeah. That’s what I mean. The demographic change cannot be stopped.

LYNN NOTTAGE: It can’t be stopped. And they’re trying to stop it. I mean, with a, what was it, $35 billion to build a wall to protect their whiteness? And that’s really—I mean, I wish they’d just come out and say it. Because it’s not about empowering the working class. Donald Trump really doesn’t give a shit about the working class, if you look at his hiring practices and his labor practices.

PAULA VOGEL: Yeah, terrible, terrifying time.

TARI STRATTON: It is. You know, Robert Schenkkan sat down and wrote his new play [Building the Wall, premièred at New World Stages in New York City’s Theatre District on 21 May 2017] in something like six days in response to what’s going on. [The play imagines a dystopia impacted by President Donald Trump’s border and immigration policies] Have either of you been inspired to do something like that, or you’re just so enmeshed in what’s happening with your current shows right now?

PAULA VOGEL: I feel like I am doing something.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Yeah. I feel like I was doing it five years ago.

PAULA VOGEL: Yeah. I feel like that’s what Indecent is.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I feel like I was proactive and not reactive.

PAULA VOGEL: And, you know, the truth of the matter is it’s been in the air for some time.

LYNN NOTTAGE: For some time, yes.

PAULA VOGEL: So if we say, “Oh, my gosh. We’re shocked,” the truth of the matter is that the failing of that working class has been going on –

LYNN NOTTAGE: It’s been coming for decades.

PAULA VOGEL: The emptying towns, and the anti-immigration has been with us. It’s been stinking to high heaven for some time.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Yeah. And This is Reading is also my response to what is happening. [This is Reading is a multi-media performance-art installation consisting of video, film and live performances inspired by themes explored in Sweat.  It was performed in and around the former Franklin Street Railroad Station in Reading in July.] I have the play, and it’s great that it’s going to Broadway. But I feel as though there is a whole demographic of people who cannot come to New York City and pay. We do have $32.00 tickets, but even a $32.00 ticket is too expensive for them after a long journey.

So, I’m trying to figure out different models and paradigms for making theatre and taking it outside of the proscenium and taking it outside of these institutions, because one of the things that I found when I was in Reading and speaking to people is that they’re very intimidated by the arts. And I thought, “Well, that should not be the case. The arts should be the thing that gives you comfort. You should feel welcome.” But they said they go into galleries—into these pristine white spaces—and to theatres, and they don’t know how to dress. They don’t know how to respond, because no one has ushered them across the threshold. Our project called This is Reading is trying to bring people into an art space who are not necessarily used to being in art spaces and then putting those people in dialogue with each other, people who are not used to talking across racial and economic lines.

I’m going to take the art to the people who really don’t have access to it. So, we’re trying to raise the money, because no one’s going to get paid. It’s free. If you give, you’re giving because you’re invested in this sort of notion of art making.

TARI STRATTON: So how about one last, nuts-and-boltsy kind of question. I just want to know if the plays have changed at all. You both had many productions, but at least from the Off-Broadway production, then when you found out you’re going to go to Broadway, to now. That’s interesting to me, because I saw both plays, and loved them.

PAULA VOGEL: We’re still finessing. There are all of these little technical crafty things in the writing, where I stood in the back and I went, “I could make that a little tighter.” We started in La Jolla, [November-December 2015] [went to] the Yale large theater [October 2015], crunched it down at The Vineyard, and now we have to bring it back out.

So we’re looking at the running time, how do we make it flow – all of that kind of stuff. You have to make it the best you possibly can until the last second that you have. For me, I think this comes down to—especially as a woman artist—I’m not going to get very many shots like this. I’m going to work to the very last moment.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I feel the same way. It’s some real tweaking, but a couple of bold shifts, rearranging of scenes, which felt a little scary, but I felt like I have to do it, because it always bothered me a little bit, and we didn’t have time to do it before. And now, this is the opportunity.

We want to squeeze some time out, and at some point, I realized I’m not going to be able to squeeze enough time out, and I just have to ask the audience to be patient. Everything can’t happen at a break-neck pace. I feel like audiences have become so impatient and restless, and you think of plays in the past in which people sat and they listened, and there were moments in which it was slow, but the slow moments were necessary to help elucidate a character and to create some of the suspense that then would pay off in the end. And so part of this process has been forgiving myself and saying, “It’s okay for this moment to take the time that it needs to take.”

PAULA VOGEL: Here’s the good news for me, and I don’t know if you’re going to agree with this, but being this age when I get the Broadway opportunity—after all of those years, I know how to get myself out of the way and listen very hard to the play. And I feel like that’s what you’re doing. Listening.

LYNN NOTTAGE: I agree with you and feel the same thing. It’s the little nagging things, which, you hear. It’s like, ugh, you know, that transition isn’t quite as smooth as I’d like, or I know that that word was always a placeholder until I found the right word, but it’s still there, because I still haven’t found the right word. Now, I’m really pressing myself to try at this moment to find the right word rather than being a little lazy, which sometimes I have been.

PAULA VOGEL: Well, I do that and I use the same word. I’ve said to people, “This is a placeholder. I’m going to come back to it.”

LYNN NOTTAGE: And sometimes you rush into production, and you don’t have time to get back to those little things because you have two weeks of rehearsal, or you have other concerns, you know.

PAULA VOGEL: That’s right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

TARI STRATTON: Do you have any last thoughts you’d like to share?

LYNN NOTTAGE: For me, it’s just always an honor and a delight to sit in a room and have this much time with Paula Vogel. I think over the years, because we’ve both been in such different spaces, we haven’t had the luxury to have this kind of conversation. So I just – I profoundly appreciate it, and I really look forward to sort of sharing this journey on Broadway with you.

PAULA VOGEL: I feel the same way and just want to say, because, you know, life flies by quickly, but I do want to say I love you, and I love your work. And your work makes me a believer every time I encounter it.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Well, you created this believer.

PAULA VOGEL: [Laughs]

LYNN NOTTAGE: But it’s true. I mean, Paula Vogel at one of the most important moments in my life—at that crossroads when you’re deciding who you’re going to be as an adult—pushed me in a direction. She was the first woman who I encountered who was writing plays and said, “You can do this.” And those words were so important to me at an age when I didn’t think that I could do it. To have someone say, “You can do this.” That’s everything.

PAULA VOGEL: Yeah. Well, you didn’t hear me scream when you won the Pulitzer. But you’re going to hear me scream on opening night. It gives me so much happiness.

LYNN NOTTAGE: Well, thank you.

TARI STRATTON: This was an honor for me, too, just to sit in the room and listen to you two. Thank you so much.

[Either Vogel was confused about the order of the out-of-town productions of Indecent, or she was referring to something else, like a workshop or developmental readings in La Jolla before Yale’s staging.  The record of the two companies’ formal productions seems indisputable.

[Tari Stratton is the Director of Education & Outreach at the Dramatists Guild of America.]

'Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954' (MoMA)

When my friend Diana asked me at Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954, the art exhibit we saw at the Museum of Modern Art on 26 February 2016, what it is that I like about Pollock’s paintings, the best I could come up with was two vague statements.  The first is simple to say but impossible to define in any concrete terms as it’s purely aesthetic: I simply find his work, especially his later canvases up through the famous “drip paintings,” beautiful.  What does that even mean, though?  I can’t say, except to suggest that they please my eye in a certain way that moves me.  That’s the best I can do.  How do you define or explain beauty—after all, it really is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?  What’s beautiful to me may not be to you or anyone else.  How do you explain that?  I can’t; can you?  So Pollock’s painting are beautiful to me: they make me happy; I smile when I look at them. 

Susanne Langer, a philosopher of art and aesthetics, defined “beauty” as “expressive form,” which she maintained “do[es] something to us.”  “Beauty is not identical with the normal,” Langer admonished us, “and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”  She continued, “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous.”  Furthermore, Langer asserted that our responses to art are “intuitive,” and therefore can’t necessarily be explained, a condition we’ll see afflicted me in my reaction to Pollock’s paintings.  (I blogged on Langer on 4 and 8 January 2010.)

My other response was even harder to describe, much less to define.  I said that Pollock’s work excites me.  It’s dynamic, energetic, explosive.  His paintings make me feel infinitely animated—I don’t really know a word for it: in motion, active.  But it’s not physical—I don’t go running around the galleries like a Tasmanian devil or something.  It’s visceral.  I actually feel as if my insides are roiling, but not like I’m sick—like I’m exhilarated.  Could that be an adrenaline rush?  Can art get your adrenaline pumping?  I suppose it can, since art triggers emotions and emotional responses can trigger adrenaline, can’t it.  Maybe that’s it then. 

I’m not altogether certain you’re supposed to explain, at least not fully, a response to art.  Music is almost entirely an emotional experience, so why shouldn’t painting and sculpture be emotional—or psychological in their effects?  Pollock himself wrote: “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.”  Diana, who turned out not to care much for Pollock’s art (I asked why she agreed to go with me to MoMA; she was curious and thought I might help her “understand” Pollock some), later when we made a short stop at the permanent collection on the fifth floor (Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat, Rousseau, and so on), explained her appreciation of several of the pictures based on the artists’ use of various painting techniques—line and focus, and color and balance.  She’s a longtime student of the Art Students League (ironically, where Pollock also studied) and an amateur painter.  I, on the other hand, have no training in art—or even “art appreciation”—and whatever I know of art theory has been picked up haphazardly over the years of just looking at painting, sculpture, and drawings—and occasional reading.  (“The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness,” wrote Langer, and “the real [artistic training] is not the ‘conditioning’ effected by social approval and disapproval, but the tacit, personal, illuminating contact with symbols of feeling.”)  I’m the quintessential “I don’t know anything about art; I just know what I like” guy. 

This wasn’t the first, nor the last, time Diana asked me to explain what was essentially a visceral response to some work of art, both visual (she did the same thing after the Alexander Calder exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art about which I wrote on 21 August 2017) and theatrical (after the Suzan-Lori Parks plays The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Venus; see the reports posted on 1 December 2016 and 7 June 2017).  I’ve never made a satisfactory reply to her query.  In any case, I didn’t help her at all.  What I see as dynamism—Pollock himself described his painting as “motion made visible memories arrested in space”—Diana sees as randomness and chance, which she dismisses as “not art,” which she insists requires control and selectivity.  Leaving aside that I don’t necessarily see that art can’t be random, at least in part at any rate, I disagree that Pollock’s work wasn’t controlled and selected.  An element of chance did enter into his work, but it didn’t operate exclusively or even dominantly.  Indeed, the artist himself declared: “I can control the flow of the paint.  There is no accident.”

We may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness,” Langer also admonished us.  Our response to a piece of art may be instinctive, but the philosopher explained that it can be prejudiced, because “the free exercise of artistic intuition often depends on clearing the mind of intellectual prejudices and false conceptions that inhibit people’s natural responsiveness.”  After all, “the function of art,” she declared, “is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.”  Additionally, Richard Kostelanetz, an artist himself as well as a critic of the avant-garde, submitted that since “audiences and critics would sooner acknowledge the familiar than explore works of art they cannot immediately comprehend . . . a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful.”  One friend of Vincent van Gogh’s, for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.”  Langer instructed that “if academic training has caused us to think of pictures primarily as examples of schools, periods, or . . . classes . . ., we are prone to think about the picture, gathering quickly all available data for intellectual judgments, and so close and clutter the paths of intuitive response.”  I think this may have been what prevents Diana (and many others who share her opinion of Pollock) from appreciating Pollock’s work—as well as that of theater artists like Parks or Adrienne Kennedy—anywhere near the way I do.

Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 at MoMA (22 November 2015-1 May 2016) was entirely composed of works from the museum’s collection and included over 50 pieces, among them engravings, drawings, lithographs, and silkscreen prints along with the paintings.  Collection Survey covered essentially the whole of Pollock’s short career (he died in August 1956 in an alcohol-related single-car crash at the age of 44), from 1930 (a painted wooden cigar box) to 1954.  (The artist painted two canvases in 1955, Scent and Search, and none in 1956.)  From one perspective, it traced the artist’s development from figurative work, visibly influenced by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, to deliberately non-representative paintings (and experiments in other media), ultimately to his drip paintings, the culmination of his distinctive style and the art form which distinguished Pollock from his contemporaries and set American Abstract Expressionism apart from European art.  In 1943, at an exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century (1942-47) of young American artists, the famous de Stijl modernist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) remarked of Pollock’s paintings, “I think this is the most interesting work I've seen so far in America. . . .  You must watch this man.” 

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on 28 January 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five boys.  He grew up in Arizona and California, where his family lived a peripatetic life, moving from ranch to ranch, town to town, and in 1928 Pollock began to study painting at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.  Plagued by disciplinary problems, Pollock was already drinking heavily by the time he turned 15.  In September 1930, 18-year-old Pollock followed his older brothers Charles (1902-1988) and Frank (1907-1994) to New York, and registered at the Art Students League, where Charles was already studying, to study under his brother’s teacher, the Regionalist painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), who encouraged him throughout the decade.  In 1937, Pollock began therapy for his drinking under the care of a Jungian psychoanalyst; he would go through several therapists in his lifetime.  Though most didn’t do him much real benefit, he was affected by Jung’s theories of the subconscious and the significance of signs and symbols and this knowledge became evident in his art. 

By the early ’30s Pollock knew and admired the murals of Mexican painters David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), and Diego Rivera (1886-1957).  He traveled throughout the U.S. during the ’30s, but spent most of his time in New York and he settled there permanently in 1933, sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with the now-married Charles.  (Brother Sande, 1909-1963, moved to New York City in October 1934 and he and Jackson shared an apartment.  Sande eventually changed his last name to McCoy—his father’s birth name before the older man was adopted as a child—to get around the Works Progress Administration’s ban on one household collecting multiple  WPA paychecks.)  Jackson Pollock worked on the WPA Federal Art Project (1935-42) and in Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in New York (1936).  (In 1931, Pollock watched Rivera paint his controversial mural at Rockefeller Center.  I posted an article on Diego Rivera on 12 and 15 April 2015.)  The painter also first met artist Lee Krasner (1908-84), a founder of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, who would eventually become his wife, in 1936, but they did not meet again for six years.

Pollock exhibited Birth (ca. 1941) in American and French Paintings at McMillen Inc. in January-February 1942.  Also exhibiting in the show was Lee Krasner and, impressed with his work, she sought out Pollock; Krasner began to support and promote Pollock’s work and introduced him to influential figures in the New York art scene.  (More outgoing than the introverted Pollock, Krasner, a native New Yorker, was one of those people who just seemed to know everyone worth knowing.  Among these was Hans Hofmann, an Abstract Expressionist with whom Krasner was studying.  He, in turn, introduced Pollock and Krasner to playwright Tennessee Williams, who, in 1969, wrote In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel which features an artist character who resembles Pollock.  There’s even a scene in which the artist discusses color theory in terms reminiscent of Hofmann.)  In August, after Pollock’s brother Sande and his wife moved to Connecticut, Krasner moved into Pollock’s East 8th Street apartment.  At the end of that year, Pollock took a job at a printmaker where he learned the technique of silk-screening; the job lasted only a short time, but Pollock would use the skill in 1943 and ’44 when he branched out from painting to experiment with other expressive forms.

The artist participated in his first show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artists for Victory, in December 1942-January 1943; on 20 May 1950, Pollock would sign an open letter (published in the New York Times) in which 28 artists (18 painters and 10 supporting sculptors) accused the MMA of “contempt for modern painting” and refusing to participate in the upcoming juried MMA show, American Painting Today – 1950.  (On 23 May 1950, the New York Herald Tribune published an editorial response entitled “The Irascible Eighteen” defending MMA, giving a name to the group of protesting artist.  In its 15 January 1952 issue, Life published a photo of 15 of the original signatories, including Pollock, under the headline, “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show,” establishing the name “The Irascibles” for the painters.)  

In 1943, Pollock briefly worked as a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (since 1947 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).  In May and June that year, the artist’s work was included in the Art of This Century’s Spring Salon for Young Artists, an exhibition of young American artists that attracted considerable attention.  In July, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) gave Pollock a contract that was extended until 1947 that paid him $150 a month as an advance against sales, permitting the young artist to devote all his time to painting.  This was followed in November with Pollock’s first solo show, at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century; Guggenheim would eventually house four solo Pollock exhibits at the gallery.  In May 1944, MoMA bought The She-Wolf (1943), Pollock’s first piece in a museum collection.  That summer, Pollock and Krasner spent the season in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Hofmann ran a summer art school.  (Tennessee Williams was also spending summers in Provincetown, surrounded by several artists, models—many of them dancers—from Hofmann’s school, and sundry others from the art and theater world.) 

Before 1947, Pollock’s art manifested the influence of  Picasso, Miró, and Surrealism, and in the early ’40s, he contributed paintings to exhibitions of Surrealist and Abstract art.  By the mid-’40s, though, Pollock was painting in an entirely abstract manner, liberating himself from the vertical constraints of an easel by affixing unstretched raw canvas to the floor.  “On the floor I am more at ease,” he would explain later.  “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”  In 1947, his “drip style,” marked by the use of sticks, stiffened brushes, or palette knives to drip and spatter paint, as well as pouring paint directly from the can (or simply punching holes in the can and letting the paint dribble out), emerged.  Pollock’s drip technique, also called “action painting,” was derived from the Surrealist focus on the subconscious and the notion of automatic drawing (“automatism”).

Abstract Expressionism, also known as the New York School, for those who don’t already know, is an art movement—but not a unified style—that began in the United States around 1940 with artists of European origin like Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and Arshile Gorky (1904-48).  It emphasizes the act of painting, as expressed in the textures and colors of the media used, and the connection between the artists, who found universal themes within themselves, and the media.  By the late 1940s, a second phase of the movement began, the principal expression of which was “gesturism” or “action painting,” which stressed the texture of the medium and the physicality of the act of painting.  (The first strain was color field painting, emphasizing unified color and shape.  Some of these artists are Sam Gilliam, b. 1933; Kenneth Noland, 1924-2010;  Morris Louis, 1912-62; and Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-2011).  Pollock, the best-known exemplar of this form of art, vigorously splashed, dripped, and splattered paint on the canvas.  (Time magazine dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper” in 1956 because of his technique.)  Other artists from this school included Mark Rothko (1903-70), Willem de Kooning (1904-97), Franz Kline (1910-1962), and Larry Rivers (1923-2002).

In March 1945, Pollock had a solo exhibition of 17 canvases at the Arts Club of Chicago; some of the pieces from the show went on to the San Francisco Museum of Art, giving the artist national exposure outside New York City.  On 25 October 1945, Krasner and Pollock were married and moved to a farmhouse in The Springs, East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island.  Eventually, he turned the property’s barn into his studio, which figured in many photos and films of the artist at work with his canvases spread out on the floor.  From December ’45 to January ’46, Pollock exhibited for the first time (of five) in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—known as the Whitney Annual (precursor to the current Whitney Biennial, launched in 1973).  In April and May of 1947, Pollock’s Mural (1943) was included in MoMA’s Large Scale Modern Paintings.  In October ’47, the most influential art critic in the country, Clement Greenberg (1909-94), declared in the British magazine Horizon (October 1947): “The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is . . . Jackson Pollock.”  The 11 October 1945 issue of Life magazine included “A Life Round Table on Modern Art” which put Pollock among such modern masters as Picasso, Miró, Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and de Kooning.  The following 8 August, Life published “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” by Dorothy Seiberling (b. 1922) that included photographs by Martha Holmes of Pollock at work.  In November and December 1949, Pollock exhibited an untitled painting in The Intrasubjectives at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York, a seminal show in the evolution of what would eventually be called Abstract Expressionism.

Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock international exposure when six of his works are included in a display of her collection at the Venice Biennale in May-September 1948; with four additional pieces, the collection traveled to Florence in February 1949 and to Rome the following June.  In July through August 1950, Hans Namuth (1915-90) took his now-famous series of some 200 photos and extensive film footage of the artist at work in his Long Island studio.  One of the canvases the painter completed while Namuth was shooting was the iconic One: Number 31, 1950, arguably Pollock’s most famous and recognizable drip painting.  Some of the photos were published in ARTnews in May 1951 and in the 1951 issue of Portfolio.  In November ’50, Namuth filmed Pollock painting on glass—so the photographer could film some of the work from below.  The film, shot outdoors and in color, was shown at MoMA in June ’51. 

Guggenheim organized Pollock’s first European solo exhibition at the Museo Correr of Venice in July and August 1950 with a show of her own collection of over 20 pieces.  Venetian art critic Bruno Alfieri (1927-2008) described Pollock’s work in L’Arte Moderna as “chaos”; “absolute lack of harmony”; “complete lack of structural organization”; “total absence of technique, however rudimentary”; “once again, chaos.”  This sounds a lot like Diana’s criticism of the artist’s work, but it was what Alfieri confessed was only “superficial impressions, first impressions,” and continued: “Pollock has broken all barriers between his picture and himself: his picture is the most immediate and spontaneous painting.  Each one of his pictures is a part of himself. . . .  The exact conclusion is that Jackson Pollock is the modern painter who sits at the extreme apex of the most advanced and unprejudiced avant-garde of modern art. . . .  Compared to Pollock, Picasso . . . becomes a quiet conformist, a painter of the past.”  (Time published the negative excerpts from Alfieri’s review, entitled “Chaos, Damn It!,” in its 20 November issue and Pollock responded in a letter to the editor, published on 11 December, declaring: “No chaos damn it.”) 

In March 1952, Pollock’s first solo show in Paris opened at the Studio Paul Facchetti and in November, art critic Clement Greenberg arranged the artist’s first retrospective at Bennington College in Vermont.  In April and May 1953, four paintings by Pollock were included in 12 Peintres et Sculpteurs Américains Contemporains, an exhibition organized and circulated by MoMA’s International Program.  The show opened at Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne and traveled to Zürich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo.  Despite his increased popularity and renown in Europe, Pollock didn’t obtain a passport until July 1955, and he never traveled outside the U.S.  By the spring of 1956, he hadn’t painted anything new in a year-and-a-half.  After several years of abstinence, he’d been drinking heavily since the fall of 1950 and his depression had deepened; his and Krasner’s marriage was deteriorating badly, and when she took off for a vacation in Europe in July ’56, he stayed home in The Springs.  While Krasner was away, Ruth Krigman (1930-2010), a young, aspiring artist with whom Pollock had begun an affair, moved into the farmhouse.  On 11 August, he was killed in a one-car, drunk-driving automobile accident in East Hampton; Krigman was with him in the car but survived, though a friend of hers who was visiting was also killed.  Krasner returned from Europe for her husband’s funeral. 

You could say that Pollock led a tumultuous, if short, life.  And maybe that’s what made his art so turbulent.  One reviewer called his work “a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.”  But if, like me, you just let it move you, the pure emotionality of the action painting, the intricacy of the lacy lines, the astonishing endlessness, boundlessness of the paintings—I’m speaking of his late work, though the early- and mid-career pieces like 1934-38’s The Flame or The She-Wolf of 1943 tend in this same direction—the lack for formality won’t amount to much.  Perhaps because he was one of the first American artists of any stature who never went to Europe to study or work, Pollock’s art showed few signs of the European refinement of Picasso, Miró, and the other continental Expressionists and Surrealists who were the vanguard of contemporary art.  He acknowledged an impact of his upbringing in the American west which can be seen and felt in the roughness and rawness of his earliest paintings in contrast with his European models—some of which was born of his familiarity with the Mexican muralists and the teaching of Thomas Hart Benton whose style was a sort of brawny social Realism.  When Pollock finally found his own style, namely the drip painting, that American vitality took the form of the dynamism and energy that make his canvases so stirring.  At least to me—for not everyone agrees even today, 60 years after his death.  Art critic Robert Coates (1897-1973), who coined the term “Abstract Expressionism,” once dismissed Pollock’s work (also sounding like my friend Diana) as “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless” in 1948 in the New Yorker.