SOURCE: Wilson, Lanford, and David Savran. “Lanford Wilson.” In In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights, pp. 306-20. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988.

[In the following interview, originally conducted December 1, 1986, Wilson discusses his early theatrical experiences, influences, and writing style.]

Born in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1937, Lanford Wilson was five when his parents divorced. His father moved to California (he wasn't to see him again for thirteen years) and he lived with his mother in a succession of rented houses before going to Chicago in 1956. There he took several jobs and finally moved to New York to become a playwright. Working at the Caffe Cino, Wilson quickly became one of the most active figures in the Off-Off Broadway movement of the mid-sixties. There, in 1964, he enjoyed his first major success with The Madness of Lady Bright. This was followed by a succession of full-length plays, most directed by his longtime associate Marshall Mason, including Balm in Gilead (1965), The Gingham Dog (1966) and The Rimers of Eldritch (1967). In 1968 he cofounded Circle Repertory Company, which since has premiered most of his work. His later plays include Lemon Sky (1970), The Hot l Baltimore (1973), The Mound Builders (1975), Serenading Louie (1976), Angels Fall (1982), Burn This (1986) and the “Talley Trilogy,” consisting of Fifth of July (1978), the Pulitzer Prize-winning. Talley's Folly (1980) and A Tale Told (1981), later revised as Talley and Son (1985).

Wilson is a skilled craftsman with a keen ear for dialogue and eye for strong characterization. From the beginning, he has employed a lyrical realism particularly apt for the expression of rich and fluent interpersonal dynamics. Although using a familiar realistic framework, he has appropriated devices, particularly in his early work, to break the naturalistic texture. He has run scenes in counterpoint against each other or interrupted the action with various stylized devices: direct address, narrative, genre painting and music. Throughout his career, he has developed plot primarily by allowing it to evolve almost invisibly out of conversation and then leading it to an emotionally or physically violent climax (confrontation, death, separation). Despite his plays' punctuation by these moments of violence (sometimes aestheticized, as at the end of Balm in Gilead), his drama characteristically moves toward reconciliation or the acceptance of loss. Tirelessly, it encourages approbation both of the anomalous individual—in the belief that all individuals are wayward—and of middle-class culture—in the belief that it promises a future in which the individual can fully realize himself.

Despite the diversity of characters in Wilson's plays and his facility in portraying group dynamics, his drama characteristically opposes two approaches to the past, linking each to a character or group of characters. Balm in Gilead, for example, is drawn with a particularly large and colorful dramatis personae and is filled with a vigorous dramatic counterpoint among various social misfits: junkies, drug dealers, pimps, whores, hustlers and drag queens. Far more than simply a cross section of New York lowlife, however, the play juxtaposes those who know themselves and survive by celebrating their identity and their past against those who have never confronted their past—or present—and lose badly. Even the dramatic center of the play—Darlene's long monologue describing the failure of a relationship which she still does not understand—is focused on the past. In the autobiographical Lemon Sky, the conflict is centered on a young protagonist and his estranged father, who is never able to reach his son or deal with his own problems. The play's double time scheme, balancing action and recollection, 1957 and 1970, offers perspective and distance on the past, but by the end it seems that even the passage of time has not provided Alan with the power to work out and accept the events of that California summer thirteen years before.

Wilson's serious study of the well-made play in the late seventies and his subsequent use of the form hasn't significantly changed his approach to the past (the revelation of information about the past is, of course, as crucial to the well-made play as it is to his own early works). His study did, however, encourage him to use a more diagrammatic dramatic form and more concentrated interpersonal conflict. Talley's Folly, his most well-made play, is an unabashedly romantic presentation of Matt Friedman's wooing of Sally Talley, completed only after they overcome the differences between them and reveal pivotal facts about their pasts: Matt's victimage by anti-Semitism and Sally's infertility. Angels Fall is even more schematic, a play in the tradition of Bus Stop. An allegory of modern crisis both ecological and psychological, the play features a cross section of middle-class America taking refuge in a New Mexico mission during a minor nuclear accident. The characters' confrontations with themselves and each other build, through a series of revelations, to climaxes just as the emergency ends and, more mindfully than before, they go back into the world.

Among the many playwrights to have emerged from the Off-Off Broadway movement, Wilson has unquestionably been the most successful commercially. His work has been seen extensively on Broadway and has become a staple of regional theatre. Certainly his warmly realistic style and the tenderness of his characters are major factors in his success. His is a theatre without villains, one in which emotionality is highlighted against witty repartee. His work does not probe psychological horror and, as a result, is accessible to many who find much contemporary drama too emotionally wrenching. Wilson remains a skilled writer of romantic fictions, providing audiences with a modicum of self-examination and thereby facilitating their return to a world less poised and graceful than his own.

DECEMBER 1, 1986—CIRCLE REP OFFICES, NEW YORK CITY

[Savran]: What were your early experiences in the theatre? And what prompted you to become a playwright?

[Wilson]: I thought I was going to be a painter. I had been writing stories from the time I was ten or twelve, but I drew and painted so much that I thought I would do that.

When I was nineteen, after one year at San Diego State, I hit Chicago and said, “I'm not going back to California.” I fell in love with big towns. So, planning to be an artist, I got a job with an advertising agency doing illustration. On lunch hours I wrote story after story and sent them out to magazines. I had rejection slips from the best magazines in the country. One day I came up with an idea and I thought, “That's not a story, that's a play.” So I started writing it as a play and within two pages I said, “Oh, I'm a playwright.” It was just as easy as that. I've told that story a hundred thousand times and I've written it as Zappy's story in Angels Fall about becoming a tennis player. Since that day I discovered I was a playwright, I have hardly drawn or painted at all. I've written very little else besides plays.

My interest in theatre began long before that. In high school I acted in all the plays. I had fallen in love with the theatre. Also in high school I saw some major plays—the local college did Death of a Salesman, a touring company did Brigadoon. But it never really occurred to me that plays were written. They were just handed down in those Samuel French books. So when I wrote a play in Chicago, I wrote it as three-fourths farce. I didn't have any idea what a farce was—I had never seen one—but I wrote one. It was quite stupid. And then I wrote a full-length play that was really very bad.

I decided I better find out what a play was so I went to one term of the downtown center of the University of Chicago, where I took a very basic adult education course. A play has conflict, write a scene of conflict. This is exposition, write a scene of exposition. We had great fun having actors from the Goodman Theatre come over and read the scenes. They would discuss them, we would discuss them, and our teacher Dr. Rhuby would discuss them. We ended by writing a one-act play. I decided if I was a playwright, I'd better go to New York.

When was that?

I got here on July 5th, 1962. I didn't remember that until years after I wrote Fifth of July. I was twenty-five.

That was just the beginning of Off-Off Broadway.

The Caffe Cino was down there. And Julie Bovasso had already done The Maids. I had written a revue while I was in Chicago and didn't have enough nerve to give it to Second City. So when I came here, I did it for the guy who ran Upstairs at the Downstairs. He offered me a job acting. But I turned it down because I knew the two actors I had come to New York with would kill me if I got an acting job. I was taking part-time jobs and writing. And I saw every play in New York. I hated everything. I had so looked forward to seeing plays. But it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. They weren't doing Death of a Salesman and Long Day's Journey into Night. They were doing Bye Bye, Birdie. The only play that was any good was Night of the Iguana and I had already seen that in Chicago on tour before it opened.

My first production here was down at the Caffe Cino—Home Free, a one-act play by a completely different person from the person who wrote those things in school in Chicago. I've never quite known what it was … maybe the atmosphere in New York. There was a huge leap. I was reading more. Maybe I had read something that said you're better off writing about your own experiences, or people you observe.

During those years, what playwrights were particularly important to you? You mentioned Miller, Williams.

I read them all, but only the Americans. I was in New York before I discovered any of the European writers. My source in Ozark and Springfield, Missouri was mainly Theater Arts magazine and those twenty-play anthologies. So I read the best twenty plays of Europe and liked them all. They were all by the same person as far as I was concerned. The first thing I saw at the Caffe Cino was Ionesco's The Lesson and it blew me completely away because I had never seen anything like that. I loved Ionesco and immediately looked up everything he had done.

I started working in the office at the Phoenix Theatre, where they did Next Time I'll Sing to You by James Saunders, which was important to me at the time. I hadn't realized that you could talk to the audience, and admit that you were on stage. With my art history background, it seemed as important to me as admitting that what you were working with was paint on canvas. So some of the early things I wrote had a lot of actors talking to the audience. It's very strange though, because years later I took the talking to the audience out. It never seemed to work. They always talked in character. Only in Serenading Louie did I drop the character and have them talk to the audience as actors. But I changed that in rehearsal because you were so convinced they were the characters that it didn't make any sense, you didn't know what in hell they were talking about.

What about Tennessee Williams?

I always loved Tennessee's work. One of the first plays I acted in was The Glass Menagerie and I thought it was just the greatest thing I had ever encountered. I was reading his short stories when I came to New York. That's about the time he wrote Sweet Bird of Youth, which has an absolutely sensational first act and an absolutely sensational third act … and the second act in between. I never responded to Inge at all. From the first play of his I read, I laughed out loud because I thought it was so incredibly stupid that a woman was telling her husband they had a daughter who was sixteen years old. And Miller I liked.

Strangely enough, I did not read Hedda Gabler for fifteen years and I missed Chekhov completely. I didn't read Chekhov until '68 or so—very, very late. I got the complete plays of Chekhov and was blown completely out of the water by him. I had never read anything like that in my life. That finally was what I thought a play should be.

I read somewhere in these formative years that Miller took the ordinary speech of the common man and transformed that subtly into a poetry for the stage. So I expected Swinburne, and I read Miller and said, “No he doesn't.” But I think that statement influenced me more than anything else, reading that and thinking, “That's a wonderful thing and should be done.” That's exactly what I had a talent for, which was probably why I responded to it. That idea and the fiction and the poetry I was reading—Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins and André Gide and Dickens—were much stronger influences on me than any playwrights except James Saunders and Brendan Behan.

I was more influenced by Behan than anybody. Balm in Gilead is my attempt to do something as good as The Hostage, which I saw in Chicago. It had been the most exciting thing I had ever seen in theatre. I came to New York saying that theatre should be a three-ring circus. God knows I've changed a lot since then, but those early plays were an attempt to create that kind of life, from Rimers of Eldritch through Lemon Sky.

Tennessee said I was doing something quite different from what he was doing and I always agreed. I rarely have the violence that he has. Yes, in some of them, in Gilead [Balm in Gilead] and Rimers [Rimers of Eldritch.] But it's a very different kind of violence. He uses a very different subject. He used himself and I was using me, what I saw and what I had experienced several years before. But only Lemon Sky is autobiographical in the same way that his plays are autobiographical. “Where I am now as an artist” is what he always wrote about. I wouldn't have the chutzpa to do that. It's just not the way I think or what I ever thought theatre should be.

Your plays, especially the early ones, tend to have group protagonists rather than a single, overshadowing hero. That's also the difference between Chekhov and Miller.

Exactly. I think it has something to do with being essentially an only child, so I'm drawn more to the group. It's either the lonely child or cockroach syndrome.

I think probably the first of my plays influenced by Chekhov was Hot l Baltimore—I was writing it as quickly as I could for Circle Rep, not thinking about it, and when I got to the third act I thought “What in hell happens here?” because I hadn't mapped it out. I went to The Cherry Orchard and said, “Of course, we'll have some champagne and leave.” That's where Suzie leaving and throwing the party came from.

But you don't really have to read Chekhov to be influenced by him because you are influenced by people who have been influenced by him. It's in the air. I knew Chekhov because of takeoffs of Chekhov I had seen. I had just never bothered to read him myself. But I had no idea that you could do what he was doing on stage and that you could hide a plot as cleverly as he does. All of his plays are plotted, of course, but the plots are hidden so incredibly beautifully, in symbols and metaphors.

When you think back on your training, what is the most striking element to you?

I think a lot of us were trained like gardeners—by doing. At the Caffe Cino we had to do everything ourselves—sets, lights. We had to get the actors, we had to get replacements when the actors got jobs, we had to act ourselves when the replacements got jobs. It spoiled us incredibly because we thought we were always going to get to do everything. It was great fun and an enormous amount of work. Four and five one-act plays a year. But we had no idea that we were serving an apprenticeship.

After doing about six or eight one-act plays with two or three characters, because that was all you could fit on stage at Caffe Cino or La Mama, I finally wrote Balm in Gilead as something you could not possibly do at the Caffe Cino. I thought of it being published but never produced. I just sat in the coffee shop and took down every word I heard, then tried to make it into a design using a circle. A strong influence on that play was the Judson Poets' Theater, the dances and some of the musicals, Gertrude Stein's In Circles and What Happened—that's where I got the idea of lifting the stage and turning it halfway around, then turning it back at the end. We did that at La Mama. It's wonderfully effective. Much of the structure of Balm in Gilead was based on the fact that you saw the outside of the counter at the beginning. Then when they turned it around and repeated some of the scenes, you saw that the guy had a baseball bat in his hand when he was arguing, that's why he wasn't frightened. And the other guy probably knows he has a bat in his hand. It was very poignant when they started turning it back around again. So that play is constructed in circles. We used circular physical actions. And a lot of those shaggy-dog stories come back on themselves, so I think of them as circles. Darlene's long story is like that.

One night I got out of a subway in the pouring rain. I didn't have a quarter on me and this guy who later became Fick was trying to get some money or trying to get me to be his buddy—I couldn't really figure it out at the time. He ran alongside me like Ratso Rizzo during this incredible rainstorm at four in the morning, and I went into my shabby little hotel room and took a hot bath because I was freezing cold and got out and spent the rest of the night writing down everything he had said.

Several years later, when I took a step back and looked at what I had done, I began not quite to trust all this technique. I reread Rimers of Eldritch about three years after I wrote it and said, “God, I haven't touched the surface of Josh.” He has ten lines and most of them are to his sister, but from his actions we know he's a terribly complicated character. With this flashy technique and all these characters, I hadn't had time to develop him. I decided to concentrate on depth of character.

In which plays?

The Gingham Dog and Serenading Louie. Louie gets a little flashy but I had only four characters and I was using them to examine and question each other and go as far as I could. I was working on Serenading Louie in '67 and Lemon Sky came from nowhere and I said, “No, I don't want to work like that anymore,” but I had to finish it anyway because it was just all there. Then I went back to Serenading Louie. And then Circle Rep came into being and that changed everything again.

When?

1969. I was in the middle of a massive writer's block at the time, which is no fun. I had had all these plays done on Broadway and it was clear that I was supposed to write The Great American Play. As soon as that was clear, I couldn't write a damn thing. It took about a year and a half, coming back to my friends and working in the office to take my mind off of result and put it back on process. Caffe Cino was gone and until I got comfortable at Circle Rep I really didn't have any reason to write.

I finally came up with Hot l Baltimore. I was trying to do something else but didn't trust my motive. The time got shorter and shorter because Circle Rep wanted a play for the following year. Marshall and I were painting flats and “The City of New Orleans” came on—I'm a train freak—and I said, “I'm going to write a play about this girl train freak who is a prostitute … I have to write that sometime.” Marshall said, “Why don't you write it now.” I started it the next day and it went nowhere for about three weeks, then suddenly caught fire and went very, very quickly.

What about the Talley plays?

Up to The Mound Builders, I felt that I never had a complete formal education. People like me read too much, see too much, over-compensate all over the place. I had never really studied writing and I didn't know what a well-made play was. I had come up with the idea of writing about my family in 1945, when my uncle came back from the war. I said, “It should be a 1945 play, one of those old-fashioned, well-made plays.” Then I said, “What in hell is an old-fashioned, well-made play?” All I knew is that it's based on Ibsen instead of Chekhov. So I reread Ibsen—and finally read Hedda Gabler—and realized, “He writes more like Chekhov than Chekhov.”

I made the mistake of getting that book by George Pierce Baker. I read it and said, “If that's what people are expecting in the theatre, no wonder no one likes my work.” So I tried to work on this 1945 play, but I couldn't do what he said and ended up writing Fifth of July, which straddled the fence between a well-made play and the way I had always written. I started out to write about these quite poor people but my brain wouldn't have any of it. In working on Fifth of July, I realized that there are about twenty plays in that house. But in working out the reason why Matt and Sally did not have children and so had brought up Shirley, and what that had meant to them, I had, of course, worked out the history of Matt and Sally and said, “That would be a very nice play too.” I was still aiming to write that 1945 play about my uncle, but by now it wasn't my uncle because the Talleys were very wealthy and ran the town. So they are based on the people my mother worked for.

Talley's Folly is more of a well-made play. It locks into place, you can actually hear it click. And you have that wonderful satisfaction of hearing the click and the incredible disappointment at the same time that it is that kind of play. It's very strange.

What do you mean by disappointment?

It's like “Oh, it's all been just a design. It's not really people at all, just this incredibly well-made piece of machinery.” You have that in Ibsen from time to time, but a completely different grand design in Chekhov. His is not all worked out on paper, but comes from natural impulses, which was always the way I had worked.

Determined to write that well-made play, I worked out A Tale Told, as it was then called. Now it's Talley and Son. Moments in the story drove me crazy. I like some of it a lot, but it was the most difficult thing I ever did. That and Angels Fall. I said, “Now I have had my well-made play experience and I'm curious what that's going to do to the way I used to write.” I found out that once you know how a play is supposed to be built, it's not easy to shake. And I had to write a play in about four months because I had said yes to a commission two years earlier from a festival down in Miami. They had called me up and said, “We have a yes from Tennessee Williams and a yes from Edward Albee, would you like to be the third one?” I said, “I'm supposed to say no?” It was great fun because they said they were giving Edward and Tennessee ＄15,000 and me ＄10,000. I said, “In a pig's eye.” And they said, “Oh, we'll give you the same.” So I had to do this and I didn't have a damn idea in my head.

I came back to New York from California in a panic and got an idea—bam!—in a bar. I saw a picture of New Mexico and I saw the entire play, all of the characters and the situation. The plays have often been a metaphor for where I think we're at, but usually I don't know that until I'm three-quarters of the way through them. This one I knew from the beginning, which is not as easy. If we're not people in a church that very few people go to, huddling there in a minor nuclear emergency, I don't know where in the fuck we are. It didn't cross the mind of a single critic. They can only find metaphors, those giant designs, in English plays like Plenty. We're making them continually and they never see it. I don't think they saw it in American Buffalo. What assholes.

Anyway, simultaneously with the idea I thought, “That is a locked-door play. And I hate a locked-door play.” That's Bus Stop and Outward Bound and I didn't want to write another genre play. But I ended up trying to write that locked-door play just as well as I possibly could. And it took everything out of me. It usually takes me a year to write a play and I wrote Angels Fall in four months. And then I rewrote it between Miami and New York. The last month I was working ten hours a day, seven days a week. With a secretary yet. It burned me out completely. I said I didn't want to have another original thought in my head for a year … and I didn't, for two.

Finally after that—I was helped by doing a translation of Three Sisters—I threw over the well-made play. The new one, Burn This, is back to Serenading Louie or Balm in Gilead, although it's only a four-character play. I wouldn't want to be without those six years of study, but it's important now to lose that. I'm happy to be back working in contemporary times and in the city with strong people to whom I don't quite know what's going to happen.

How do you write a play now?

For Burn This I had an idea about four years ago of a very interesting kind of coincidence and I had the two central characters. I was working on too many other things and didn't have a chance to write it. Four years later I was a little panicked because I wasn't working on anything. In three years I had written one one-act play and the translation of Three Sisters. It took me five times longer to translate it than it took Chekhov to write it, because he had the benefit of knowing Russian. I had to learn the goddam thing. So I was feeling real physical anxiety, getting as stiff as poured concrete. Usually I say, “Stop that,” and I stop. But I couldn't not feel this anxiety. So I said, “Describe that.” I started describing my physical symptoms and within half a page it turned into a character and I no longer felt any of that anxiety. So what I look for first is a character. And eventually someone says, “I can help you” or “Oh shut up,” and then you have two points of view.

I think Burn This is the best thing I've done. It's a love story. But it's not at all like any love story that I've ever written or seen. It's a love story in which people say “I don't want this” instead of “I love you.” It's very contemporary. After all the damn dance I've seen since Judson, and talking to dancers and having all these dancer friends—and of course Joe Cino was a dancer, too—I can finally write a dancer. And even at that I had to interview. This is modern dance and of course it isn't at all like classical ballet, where you start when you're nine and never see your mother again.

After I finally came up for air in this character I said, “What in the hell is that? Oh yeah, that's the idea from four years ago with that clever little gimmick.” So I worked it out with the gimmick. We had a first reading and I said, “Cut it.” So the thing I started with for the plot is gone and there is no plot, only character development—except there is a plot. It's just that I managed to hide it as well as I ever have. And it's convoluted in exactly the same way those early plays are. But this isn't circles, it's mirrors and landscapes. It's strange that the one thing I thought I had for sure, this nice little gimmick, was the first thing to go. The second thing to go was the very first page I had written, that had started me back to work and got me to find those four characters.

Do you rewrite a lot before the first rehearsal?

I did a lot more on Angels Fall and on Talley and Son than I did on this, which is a good sign. I also did very little on Hot l Baltimore. Burn This has taken forever because I wanted John Malkovich, and he couldn't do it for the longest time. I finished it in December and we got him for a reading in August. So I rewrote it some for the first reading we had here, and some for the reading in August, and some for California for December. But not a whole lot. We'll probably be paring it down during rehearsals—it's a little wordy—and clarifying and changing some things. I've rewritten the first scene about five times. It's only the first half of the first act that keeps changing and will keep changing. The rest stays exactly the same.

How long now have you worked with Marshall Mason?

'65, I think, was the first time we worked together.

What is your working relationship?

It's great. He'll say, “I'll take care of this and you take care of that.” It's like two heads instead of one. It's especially terrific on the large-cast plays. He'll say, “I'll never get that girl to do that.” So I say, “I'll talk to her, if you can get him to do what he's supposed to do.” He has seen a play at least fifteen times over the year I've been working on it. We've seen readings of it. He has read scenes. I've read scenes to him. He knows more or less what the play is, so we both know exactly what we want. And then in casting we find ourselves very, very close every time. And since we both know what we want, we trust either to get it. And so if I'm talking to someone over in the corner, he knows I'm not telling them something that is going to undermine his purpose. He says, “Good, that's taken care of.” I don't do that too much, but it gives him maybe a quarter more time than he would normally have.

Do you normally go to all of the rehearsals?

All except for the first two or three when they're improvising. They need to do that for scenes like “the first time she met Burt.” And that's very nice because if they improvise it, they'll always have that experience in their minds when they're playing, to fall back on. I would rather die than see them improvise. I always think it's better than the scene I wrote. But when they start saying my words, I'm there. Because they may need me. Or I may need them.

Do you do much rewriting in rehearsal?

Clarification. If someone says something for the fourth time and isn't making sense out of it, I'll say, “Do you know what that means?” He'll say no. I'll ask, “Who knows what that means?” And the other three people will say what they think it means and if they're right, the first person will say, “Oh, of course, what an asshole I am.” If no one quite knows I say, “That means this, in other words.” And they all go, “Why didn't you say that?” Then I usually go back to the typewriter to clarify because I don't think there's a point in being misunderstood. I hate not understanding something … unless it's the sort of play you're not supposed to understand, which is a whole different thing. But I'm not writing Last Year at Marienbad and neither is anyone else I know.

And do you rewrite often after a first production?

I wish I didn't, but I do. I keep writing. The trade edition of Fifth of July is quite different from the last rewrite of the play, published by Dramatists Play Service. I have a horror of anyone doing the hardback version instead of the actors' version.

What production are you particularly happy with?

There are about six or seven. We've done some very good work. We did Hot l Baltimore here and then we did it in California, and I came back from California thinking I had seen the ultimate production. But the production here was forty times better and I didn't know it until we came back to it. I was hyperventilating. I completely forgot that I had written it. I just had not seen anything like that on the American stage before. Angels Fall … I told you of the reservations I have with that kind of play, but the production was stunning. You wanted to fuck the lights. I am still incredibly pleased with the costumes, with Nancy Snyder walking across the stage leading with her pelvis in that dress that kept flipping back and forth around her waist. Peeling that green apple, the only green on the set.

I thought Malkovich's production of Balm in Gilead was absolutely stunning. Our first production of Balm in Gilead was stunning, too, and very much like Malkovich's. We used music that was contemporary then. We didn't use Bruce Springsteen because Bruce Springsteen didn't exist then … he probably wasn't even born. Both Lemon Skys have been terrific. Serenading Louie at Second Stage was the most difficult rehearsal period I ever went through because I didn't want to go back to that place again. I rewrote a couple of scenes and I think I improved them but I couldn't really tell. It's a pain in the ass to be questioned as closely as those incredibly serious actors questioned me.

Who directed?

John Tillinger. It looked like shit all during rehearsals but the first preview was pretty damn good and the second preview was pretty damn amazing and after that it was just astonishing. But that play has always been difficult for me. I hyperventilate for all the wrong reasons. I like the play, but I don't like my experience of the play.

Do you read the critics?

Oh yeah. It's a business so you want to know if you're going to run. Also, Marshall and I are better at finding quotes in a review than any of the people who are paid to do it. We're shameless at it because we really don't take it that seriously. We don't let the actors read them because it can fuck up their performance. The critics never say anything enlightening about the writing—unless of course they like it in which case it's wonderful. I read reviews of productions I haven't even seen. Pittsburgh Public Theater sent me the reviews of Serenading Louie and I had great fun reading those. But I haven't taken any advice from any of them.

What direction do you see the American theatre going in now? It seems that both Broadway and Off Broadway are changing.

Have they? How?

Broadway is no longer a forum for serious drama, with a few exceptions.

Name one.

Glengarry Glen Ross.

And Hurlyburly. That's about it. Even Benefactors didn't do it for me. Glengarry, 'night, Mother and Hurlyburly. Especially Hurlyburly. What do you know? A good play on Broadway. Good Lord, it's enough to put you in a time warp. As I said, when I got here, I hated everything on Broadway. I don't think there have been more than two good plays on Broadway since '62. Good God, that's twenty-four years! So many things are bombed before anyone has a chance to see them. And something else isn't very good but gets praised. And something else squeaks through for a short while. I don't suppose anyone makes any money. Of the plays I've had done on Broadway, only Talley's Folly returned its investment. Fifth of July ran fourteen months and ended up costing money. Angels Fall is starting to return some money from around the country, but it was a total wash. So as far as the business goes, that's lousy. Off Broadway? I have difficulty finding Off Broadway right now.

Well, the Public for instance.

I can get only so interested in Czechoslovakian theatre. There are some … they did an Innaurato last year that was astonishing. And the Kramer play. Tracers was wonderful and good to see.

In your letter to me you mentioned Irene Fornes's work.

She's unlike anyone else, which is amazing to see. And she's like me in that one play is not much like the next, as opposed to say Chekhov or Sam Shepard, who seem to be writing the same play over and over again. So I'm crazy about her work.

I have a lot of energy but I am not by nature positive. But I am positive about the theatre. I can't think of a time that has had so many theatre artists of the quality that we have working right now. There just isn't another period that has Irene Fornes and David Rabe and David Mamet and Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson and about ten others. Now three-fourths of them aren't getting the recognition they deserve. And that none of their plays are running is really beside the point. We will go down as a Golden Age—I sound like a fucking Chekhov—in American theatre. Not one of those writers is writing like any other. We're all working our own turf, our own brain, our own dream, our own vision. And I think that is very, very exciting.

We're building a strong theatre literature that is being done across the country—it's not being done in New York except for about two weeks or sometimes all of three or four months—but it's being done in every regional theatre, all the work that goes from being a failure with the New York critics to being extremely important to everyone throughout the country. Serenading Louie ran twice as long in a 700-seat theatre in Pittsburgh as it did in a 70-seat theatre in New York. So I don't feel particularly good about New York theatre—the finances are totally fucked. But I feel very good about theatre across the country. After all, that's what we're talking about. We can't be bothered about New York theatre.

What are your plans for the future?

I would hope to write a decent play. I've been getting involved with these damn actors who can't move with a play for an extended life. It happens time and again. I'd like to stop doing that, write for unknowns. The next play will be for unknown actors or else I'm going to sign them to a two-year contract. When you work on something very hard and do it correctly with no compromises, you want it to be seen that way by as many people as possible. Only in one case, with Richard Thomas coming into Fifth of July and Joe Bottom who followed him, have I had a production with replacements as good or better than the original. Both guys were not only dynamite, they fit into the ensemble. But that almost never happens when you're doing an ensemble piece.

Do you have a favorite among your plays?

I don't really. It depends on my mood. Until I see it on its feet in front of an audience, I'll like Burn This the best. I might even like Hot l Baltimore if I read it. I've not read it since it closed Off Broadway, twelve years ago or whatever, so I don't know what that play is anymore. But really, whichever one I'm going to do next is my favorite.