SOURCE: Wilson, Lanford, and Esther Harriott. “Interview with Lanford Wilson.” In American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews, pp. 36-58. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1988.

[In the following interview, originally conducted in December 1982, Wilson discusses his penchant for developing complex characters.]

I met with Lanford Wilson in December 1982 at the offices of the Circle Repertory Theater in New York. Wilson was a co-founder of the theater in 1969 and has been a resident playwright there ever since. Every room was in bustling use, and Wilson suggested that we walk to a café in the neighborhood.

Thin and handsome and dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a black leather jacket, Wilson looked much younger than his 46 years. He was tired, and at the beginning of the interview when I asked questions about his affiliation with Circle Rep—questions that he has apparently been asked many times—he was politely impatient. But when we began to talk about his plays, he warmed to the conversation. He is seldom asked to discuss his work seriously, he said afterwards. Wilson is a shy but animated talker who, appropriately for a playwright, often frames his answers in anecdotes composed of dialogue. Sipping wine at our minuscule table, he talked volubly and with charm until my three hours' worth of tapes ran out.

[Harriott]: Are you in an enviable position as a playwright because you're in a repertory company?

[Wilson]: It's not enviable unless you want to work that way. I've created an atmosphere in which I can work, and other playwrights would envy that only if they can work in that kind of atmosphere. We have a bunch of them—I'm not the only one. We have twelve resident writers and a workshop of probably 24 or 25 writers and the actors are available to any of them, to read scenes so that the playwright can hear his work spoken by the person he's writing for. That's just what I needed—working in a group and not being completely isolated, and having the feeling that the play is going to get on, rather than writing in a vacuum for some producer's secretary to read or not read, and ship them out in the mail. I've never mailed a script to anyone and I'm awfully happy about that—at least not since 1968. I suppose my agent does though, so that doesn't really count.

You started with Caffe Cino and then moved to Circle Rep?

Yeah. I did a one-act play for Circle called The Family Continues and then The Hot l Baltimore. That was the first full-length one.

The Family Continues is like a piece of music, isn't it?

I was writing like that for a while. It was an experiment to get back to work and I wasn't even thinking that I was writing. Well, it was a story more interesting than that. When we started Circle Rep I gave them Lemon Sky to do and they couldn't do it because they didn't have a “father.” And Marshall [Mason] at that time was only casting within the company. At the time I was writing Serenading Louie, and Lemon Sky was finished. Lemon Sky got on in Buffalo and Serenading Louie almost simultaneously—just before the Buffalo show—opened down in Washington, D.C. Then The Gingham Dog was done on Broadway and Lemon Sky moved to Broadway, and I was having a lot of activity outside Circle. Of course they bombed, or to various extents none of them ran. Lemon Sky was fairly well received but it didn't run any longer than Gingham Dog, which was fairly badly received.

I wanted to ask you about that, because I think Gingham Dog is a fine play. It's so true.

It wasn't a very good production, actually. The actors could do it, but for some reason Alan Schneider's production was just not very good. He had them arguing from the very top. They were screaming at each other from the very first line, and all the humor and nuance and life got washed right away. The second act was done more or less correctly, but it was too late. So what happened then was logical, since I'd been fairly well received but not run. But that didn't matter because I thought commercial theater was absolutely abominable at the time and so I would have been embarrassed if I'd had a hit. But I thought I had to write the Great American Play next. And it is impossible to set out to write the Great American Play. I mean, you write “The Great American Play” across the top of the page and you'll never write another word. And so I went into this enormous decline and didn't write anything for about a year and a half.

That's a short period of time, as playwrights generally write in America.

Not for me, because I've been very, very prolific, as you know. I mean, I don't feel I'm prolific, but other people say I'm prolific, and I do keep turning work out where other people keep not turning work out. So what I did just in order to remain sane is I started going to the office at Circle Rep where all my friends were. They were all in the midst of overwhelming activity, doing all these plays and all these shows.

Actor friends?

Mostly actors at the Circle Rep. We didn't have nearly as many playwrights then. And since I was a member of that group, I hung around there and answered the phone and helped clean up and helped build sets and wasn't writing at all, because I couldn't write, but I was reading scripts. And Marshall decided he wanted to do two one-act plays of mine—The Great Nebula in Orion and Ikke Ikke Nye Nye Nye. And I said, “But you've got this company of actors, and you'll use two in the one play and two in the other. And that's only four. They're both short, so why don't I do another little thing that will use more people?” And so that play was written as just an exercise for eight to ten people. I just was doing something for the Circle Rep actors to do. I took what is basically my play Wandering and wrote it in a different way. It became very musical, and also I wanted to use some of the exercises that Marshall was doing—exercises in trust. And I finished the damn play before I knew I had written something. It was the first thing I had written in about a year and a half.

That sort of answers the question that I didn't really ask but had at the back of my mind, which was, does the fact that you've been in a repertory theater have something to do with the fact that you've continued to write?

I think so, because they keep needing work. And naturally if they're doing six plays a year I want one of them to be mine. I've skipped a few years. It sometimes takes longer to write. I always tell Marshall to have an alternate selection in mind and not to tell me, so that he can have it ready in case I don't get my play finished on time. And with The Mound Builders I didn't.

That's a wonderful play.

I like that play, too. It's one of the only times I've written what I intended to do. You have an idea, and when the play is all finished, you say, “That isn't what I intended to write at all.” But when I finished The Mound Builders I said, “That is exactly what I intended to do.” It's lovely for that to happen. I didn't know the specifics but I knew that there would be something outside that's going to get you. And when I was about three or four months into the play, I said, “I think this is about work.” Why people work and what is the impulse to work and why do we strive to do good work.

It's a play, like a lot of your plays, about waiting for the end—that “something outside that's going to get you”—and what do you do in the meantime.

Yes, what do you do in the meantime and that was answered—you work. That was what I had intended to write, and that was so thrilling to me.

I'm surprised to hear you say that, because I always get the feeling that you're in complete control of your material.

Not always. Things slip away and characters get out of hand and you have to slap them around a little more than you intended to. They take off in their own direction and it surprises me and leads me into slightly different areas from where I had intended to go. And I say, well what do you know? This turned out to be that. Like, Hot l Baltimore is so much sweeter than I thought it was. I thought I was writing the first filthy play. I was teaching Ron Tavel how to write a dirty play. And I got the first two acts finished and people were reading it to me—because I was going around saying, “What in the hell happens in the third act? I don't know how to end this play.” I thought I had written this uncommercial, unproducible, filthy play. And they finished reading the first two acts and I said, “My God, that's charming.” I called my agent and I said, “You know that filthy play I'm writing? It's charming.” She said, “Charming? With all those whores and all those dykes and all that?” And I said, “I know. It's charming.” I couldn't believe it. I was so disappointed in a way.

Did you think Balm in Gilead was going to be a filthy play?

No, I didn't even know Balm in Gilead was a play. I was sitting in a café writing down things that people said.

Oh, you do do that? I asked myself that question, because your dialogue sounds so real.

It was dictation. But not all of it. It's orchestrated and I was doing all sorts of sound patterns. I was just playing. I was doodling with sound.

And with time.

Yeah. And then I started playing with the idea of monologues that I got directly from James Saunders' play Next Time I'll Sing to You. There are four shaggy dog stories that are told to the audience—he has just one, but I swear it must be 15 minutes long. When I got it all finished and put in those shaggy dog stories, I said, “You know, this is looking very much like a full-length play.” I hadn't written a full-length play. I divided it and wrote the long monologue at the top of the second act.

In The Hot l Baltimore and Balm in Gilead and in all of your plays you show a lot of compassion for the outsider. And in The Gingham Dog you pay the most attention to the feelings of a black character, which is rare for a white playwright.

Well, of course, there's Athol Fugard.

Yes, but he's living in South Africa where that issue is the central fact of his life.

That came about because at that time [1969] everybody was writing these wild, hate-filled, screaming plays. It didn't jibe with what I was seeing and I wanted to do something very different. Matt Friedman [the hero of Talley's Folly] came about the same kind of way. I got so sick of the stage Jew. The way those Jewish writers write themselves and their mothers and their fathers—I just hated it. And even the novelists.

Like Philip Roth?

Philip Roth and others. And I said, O.K. That's fine, that's one aspect of it, and we've suddenly discovered our Jewish hate. But that my Jewish friends aren't like that at all. I wanted to see if I could write a Jewish stage character that doesn't have all of those clichés. One of the strong attempts in that play was to write a Jewish character as he might really be—a Jewish hero, rather than all those Jewish villains that were being written and all those ghastly women.

That suggests a couple of questions that I want to ask you. In Brontosaurus you have the nephew say, “I felt myself thinning out.” He talks about feeling himself a part of all kinds of people. And it seems to me that you're like that. That is, you seem to sense how a lot of different kinds of people from different classes and different regions feel. I don't know how you do that—whether it's just instinctive.

I had that experience exactly as he describes it, which is what Allen Ginsberg would call having a satori experience, I think. I had that when I was 11. It's an indescribable experience, so I said O.K. let's try to describe it. I could have become a minister from having had that experience. I did not. It was interesting to try to recall it and write it as clearly as I could. And Zappy's monologue in Angels Fall, the one about tennis. When I was working in Fuller, Smith & Ross, I was an apprentice in the art department there and I thought I was going to become a graphic designer. But I was writing a lot of stories. And working in an advertising agency wasn't as interesting as I thought it was going to be.

This was before everything—before you wrote plays?

This was before everything, yeah. I was 20. I was writing stories—I started writing stories when I was very small and kept writing stories. But I was really an artist. I was just writing stories on the side, and because friends of mine at San Diego State were writers, and I wanted to be in a class with them, so I took a writing class. I kept writing stories on my own after I left San Diego. It was very good relaxation from this stupid job I had—the closer you get to advertising the more you realize you don't really want to be a part of it all.

Morally, you mean?

And also you don't want to go through the hassle. I thought it would be great fun designing a logo. And you design about 20 of them, but the account executive won't show 15 of them to the client, who hates them all anyway. It's all just such compromise that it's not design, it's something else. That was very disheartening. Anyway, I thought of a story and I realized it wasn't really like a story. It was like a play, like The Glass Menagerie. The narrative in all of my stories had been awkward and the dialogue had been good. The dialogue in the stories was almost better than it was supposed to be. It was more speakable than dialogue that you see in stories. So I started writing just dialogue and trying to get my ideas straight. And by the middle of the second page—they were big pages—I said, I'm a playwright. Forget all the art I'd been studying for 20 years. I'm a playwright. I write plays. It was like a thunderbolt. That experience is translated into Zappy's “Since I hit that first ball, I said this is me. This is what I am.”

And once you decide who you are, “the rest is just work.”

“The rest is just work.” I knew I had a specific talent for writing plays. And I knew then I was better at it than 99 percent of the people who were working at it already. That was what I was given. And as Zappy says, once you've been shown that, you can't just say you weren't shown that. So the rest is just work. You were asking about the characters, and this was all to answer that most of those things, I've experienced. They've happened to me or I've seen them and empathized with someone else having that experience.

I said that your remark about wanting to write about Matt Friedman not as a stage Jew, but as a sort of redeeming act, suggested two questions. The other one is about The Gingham Dog. You make a point of having your male protagonist say that he's disillusioned, that when he grew up in a small town in the South he wanted to be large-spirited about Jews and about blacks. But when he came to New York he found that these stereotypes were, in fact, vindicated, and it's upsetting to him.

That is one whole side and the other whole side is completely different. He does say that, yeah. And you do see it. You do see Jews and blacks behaving in a terribly unattractive, stereotyped way from time to time. And you say, oh please don't do that, oh God, that's terrible, that's awful! Lord, you're behaving in exactly the way … you see it with Ozark hillbillies too. And ten minutes later, if you stayed with them, they'd be behaving in a way that completely denied that. Or else there are some that the stereotype is based on and there's nothing you can do about that.

Do you know the critic Leslie Fiedler?

No.

He says that in every stereotype there resides an archetype.

Yeah. Oh, there are some who are exactly … you know, there are some lazy, slovenly blacks who think of nothing except sex, and your stereo's not safe with them. But then there's Gloria Foster. Or any number of other people.

Why wasn't A Tale Told published?

It was done here and then I rewrote it a great deal. It was not completely successful. By that I mean it wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be—or what any of us wanted it to be, what Marshall wanted it to be. It was a gorgeous production but it just wasn't the play yet. And so I rewrote it and we did it at Mark Taper Forum in California, where we do a lot of them. And it was vastly improved. It was so much improved that in some of the audience discussions that we had, I began to realize what the play had to be, and said, “Oh my God, have I got a lot of work to do on this yet! But not now.” Because I had to write Angels Fall—that was a commission. So I postponed the Broadway production because it was just not what it should be yet, and I didn't have any time to do it then. Also, I was exhausted on the damn thing—you burn out on them after a while. So that's the next project, to go back to A Tale Told and rewrite that play the way it should have been.

You said that you began writing stories and then found that the dialogue was coming off the page. The sad thing is that very few people in this country start off by writing plays. Most people who want to be writers think of fiction and poetry. There are so many more obstacles for a playwright.

You have to be bit. You have to be stage-struck. You have to like theater in some way to begin with. I saw a college production of Death of a Salesman and in the middle of the monologue when he remembered the past before all those buildings had been built, and they all faded into green trees—the backdrop changed from solid brick buildings to these bright, shining green trees—and I was hooked from then on. The next thing I saw was Brigadoon. Oh, my God, when that village appeared? I was gone.

You're talking about technological things.

That was magic! It was what hooked me. It's not what I'm trying to do. Magic, yes. But in who knows what different kind of way. Magic with words and time and juxtapositions and light.

How did you know in, say, Balm in Gilead, that by dimming the light on the characters very briefly, that it would be so effective?

Yeah, I think it is. We got it down to a flash of—bang!—about that long. The reason I did it was because in this cacophony I wanted to point out the person that you're going to have to watch.

It does something else too. It changes the perception of time.

It does all kinds of other things that I hadn't even intended at the time. It was just a good experiment. There are others in that play that don't work as well. But there are some very nice experiments in it, too. I haven't read that play in years, but the last time I did, I said, “Why don't I still write like that? My God, that's very inventive.”

When they repeat the stabbing of Joe three times, that's very chilling.

That is very chilling, really scary. We'd be going on with all this noise for the entire length of the play. It builds, and then he's stabbed as those kids go flying out. I was thinking of the play as music all the way through, and I wanted to have a musical climax. And also, even though this was a climax, it looked insignificant because there's been so much brutality and so much carrying on, that it almost isn't any more important, and did it three times for those reasons. And just repeating that almost for the physical impact. And boy, is that scary! Boy, does it work! Also the way Marshall did it was astonishing, because Joe falls back over the table and slumps down the first time, as the kids are going out, and someone pulls him up. And they stab him again and he falls back exactly the same way, and the kids are going out again. And people pull him up again. And the third time he falls down and the table collapses—one beat later.

It reminded me of a nightmare. It had that quality of relentless repetition.

It was supposed to have. I was for all practical purposes a Missouri farm kid. You couldn't surprise me too much. You've seen an awful lot. You've seen horses die and you've seen cows die and you've seen birth and all of that. And your or someone's uncle's a drunk. You know how people are and it's not really a shock to you. But to see in New York so much of it and carried to such extremes, and the poverty and degradation and where people had put themselves. Of course, I had lived in Chicago for a long while. But it was just more intense in this place. And I had never been around the drug scene much. That was new to me.

You seem to know an awful lot about the drug culture.

Strictly research. I'm not a druggie and never have been. So it's strictly how does that feel and what is that like and how much does it cost—strictly asking questions. And seeing people on it.

That play is sort of Brechtian, too, isn't it? That pretty tune with those bitter words, and the cast of characters—outcasts and hustlers.

Well, I had not read a single play of Brecht's when I wrote it. Of course, I knew the songs from The Threepenny Opera, but I wasn't thinking it was like that. New York was so new to me, I was just writing down what it was like. I was, to a large extent, like the character Darlene coming to this city.

In a lot of your plays, like Lemon Sky, you insist on reminding the audience that this is theater. Just as it gets drawn in, you have a character speak to the audience in an authorial voice, describing or commenting on what's happening.

I haven't been doing that very much lately. I haven't done it in the last few plays. It was in Serenading Louie, and I cut it out, and it's not really in The Mound Builders.

There's a tiny bit still in Serenading Louie. You have a couple of addresses to the audience.

I have a couple of addresses to the audience, yeah. But I mean, in Serenading Louie, they did say in the first draft, “Even when you're actors like us, hired on the stage to do a part, and everything is perfectly planned out and you know all your lines, still there's that awful feeling that, tonight, goddam it, I may just run amok with the meat cleaver.” And I cut that out and just had them speak that in character, so it's the character, not the actor talking to the audience. It's just very natural for me to have the character talk to the audience. In The Mound Builders I don't have the character talking to the audience, but to the tape recorder.

I don't mean just talking to the audience. That's part of it, I guess. But, for example, in Lemon Sky the young son, the protagonist, gives the audience a lot of hints about what's going to happen in the rest of the play. He's the playwright in a way.

Yeah. It's autobiographical and it's my story, and he's a playwright. He's saying how he's organizing the play. That line, “A year from now I'll be in a park in Chicago with a letter in my pocket from Ronnie telling me that Carol is dead. But who would know that now?” was such a surprise to me when I wrote it. But I just was trying to give the audience the perception of the character that I had, that knowing what happened to that character, Carol, made remembering her incredibly painful. I was just trying to have them see her in a very different light. So everything she says after that, you say, “My God, this is the last time …” I always started out saying, “This is the stage, what can you do on it?” And I like real people better than abstract idea plays. I was very interested in the way people behave. So, given characters in more or less a set, or at least a setting, like platforms that represent an entire town, what can you do on that? How can you mess it up? I'm not doing that much any more because I'm not sure I believe that any more. Am I just doing it to make it interesting? Is it getting too tricky? And is it taking away from the character development—would the characters be deeper and more true if I was going through real time with them, rather than cutting around like that? I went through a long period of not trusting it. Then when I got to The Mound Builders it became the logical way to write, because they're examining shards and pieces and seeds and little bits of things and putting them together to make a story. So I thought it was trickily endemic to the piece to have it in shards and fragments and pieces that you put together yourself.

Do you read a lot of science and paleontology?

I used to have a subscription to Scientific American and Sky and Telescope. I still do some, but not as much as I did. I used to read science a lot.

And were you very religious at one time?

Yeah, I was converted in the black Baptist church in Lebanon, Missouri. Me and Patsy Johnson. The only white kids there, at the Bible school.

You have quite a few characters who want to believe in something, like Carl in Serenading Louie, for one.

What Carl believes in, of course, is that American dream, where the college quarterback falls in love with the homecoming queen and they get married and have two kids and live happily ever after. That's his religion, that's what he believes. And when that is not true it washes everything his life has built on out from under him, and he no longer has anything to believe in at all. If that's not true, he cannot function. Everything's been based on that. He goes to work every morning and makes a million bucks, and can deal with all that jangle that he has to deal with, based on that. And that base goes and he can no longer deal with anything. He's a tragic character, Carl. I like him a lot.

But he does believe …

Yeah, he does have that first speech about the church. I'm sorry. You were getting at something else.

I was getting at the saddest thing about him, that he doesn't really feel anything any more. Or so he says. There are two things happening there. He says he doesn't feel anything any more and compares himself to primitive people making sacrifices in order to have some feeling about something, and says that his wife is exposing their marriage to danger so as to feel something. But yet he really does feel so much.

He feels so much, but he can't let it get to him because it'll destroy him. And he does, and it does. He's so obsessed with Mary and what is happening to the foundation of his life, and he is not feeling many other things that he feels he should.

But he claims he's not feeling that much even about Mary.

But he certainly is. He has that outburst that denies it at the end of the first act. He says, “I see all of these things that go by like it was all happening in the movies and I say I don't feel anything but I do. But I don't understand it—why is she doing this? I want it back the way it was”—in other words, the way it was in fantasy.

The people in that play are very familiar.

Aren't they familiar?

The play wasn't very well-received by the reviewers here, was it?

In Washington it was well-received. All of the mature people are blown away by it. It's John Bishop's favorite play of mine, it's Marshall favorite play of mine, it's everyone's favorite play of mine.

Is it your favorite play of yours?

No, because there are a few technical things that don't quite work toward the end of the play. We finally got it working in Chicago—there's a new version of it—there's a few little technical fudgings around that work much better. It's not mine because it was so painful to go there and I very nearly went crazy writing that play. I kept losing it and I must have been in some very bad place. I kept damn near going crazy because I kept discovering things that I didn't want to know, and once I discovered them I didn't want to deal with it.

Is this one of the cases where the characters started to take over?

Oh, God, yeah! I started examining, “Why do you do that? Why do you feel that?” As I said, much of this was me. I was probing what I felt in four different areas, and the four different areas of me are the four characters. I wasn't trying to write myself. I just said, “How is that true to me? What do I feel about this?” And then I would check it out with friends of mine. I would say, “Would you read this and tell me if this is true to your experience?” And then they'd read it and go, “Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, my God! Yeah. Oh Lord!” And I'd say, “O.K. Thanks very much. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't too incredibly weird and private.” I was working this way on that play, and it led into some areas that I hadn't really intended to go into—all those weird, dark, black areas of Carl.

Do you mean the primitive person under the veneer?

Yeah. And that to destroy this marriage if it wasn't true was the absolute only recourse that he had. He had thought about just killing the child to bring them together, but for any number of reasons that wouldn't really work. It was very strange territory to be getting into. That all just started out with these two guys, when I was living in Glen Ellyn and coming in on the commuter train.

Where's Glen Ellyn?

It's a suburb of Chicago—way out and rather rich. Me and another guy had a very poor house in the woods. I worked at some art personnel service, and handled their correspondence, and wrote stories most of the time on their typewriter. So I came in looking like this [indicating his jeans and T-shirt] with all the advertising guys in their grey flannel suits at seven in the morning. And I was still living there when I worked at Fuller, Smith & Ross. I usually stayed very late in town, until eight or nine o'clock. Once I had nothing to do and was exhausted, and I went with some of the guys into this bar that they always went to, that I knew nothing about. They were all in their thirties and I was twenty. And they would down the martinis and get their ride home to the suburbs. It was the first time that I was in that crowd that was just one hour and three martinis away from closing time, on their way home to their wives. I saw those two guys, they had their arms around each other and their heads smashed together, so drunk, and they were talking, both in their three-piece suits. And they stood and held hands. And they were saying, “I love you, you know what I mean?” “I know what you mean. I love you too.” “I really love you, you know what I mean?” This was very embarrassing, they were both so drunk. And they split, and one went on one train and one went on the other. That's when I started thinking about these men relationships—this football with the boys on Sunday afternoon and all that. That was the genesis of that play. Men relationships where they talk so weird and so honestly and unguardedly and such bullshit.

And they fear and hate their wives.

Fear and hate their wives. Fear and hate and love their wives. And I thought, when have they ever expressed anything like that to their wives, even drunk? During orgasm is the only time they would have an experience that large, even if then.

You were 20 when you saw this image and then you wrote a play about it when you were 32?

I had been trying to write it. The bar where I sat with those account executives and layout artists—it was the first time I had ever been in it—was one of those midtown bars. It was so chic and quiet and fancy and has only the old standards like Ella Fitzgerald on the jukebox, and it's so low you can't hear anyway. Everything is carpeted and behind the bar they had these little Italian twinkle lights all in white, flickering off and on. I sat there listening to these people I worked with every day get progressively drunker and expose the most hideous things, being appalled at what was happening to these people and just learning altogether too much about them. Consequently, I thought for a long while that the play was going to take place in the bar on Christmas Eve. In that quiet, muted, uptown, dark, dark bar.

It took a long time to write that play. The first start of it was years earlier, before I did Lemon Sky. I had been working on Lemon Sky for years too, but one day I was trying to work on Serenading Louie and all of Lemon Sky came to me and I sat down and wrote it in a very short period. Then I went back to Serenading Louie. One of the starts was they've gone to one bar and it closed at six and now they've gone to one that closed at seven. Those midtown bars closed at what I used to think was the middle of the afternoon because their clientele was just the executive crowd. Their big season is lunch and from five to seven. It started with them coming in already pretty too high and the guy saying, “Wait. Wait. Hold it. Nobody moves.” The guy can't find his wallet. “Wait.” And then he finds it. I remember that very clearly, whatever happened to that note. It ended up not in the play. And gradually it started forming itself into Serenading Louie.

It's interesting. You have so much compassion and psychological insight and sensitivity, but there's one unredeemed character in your plays, I think, and that's Douglas [in Lemon Sky].

Might well be. I had more facts to go on there than in most of them. I said at the beginning of the play, “If I can't write this character honestly, then it tells you more about me than if I could.” What does Alan say? “If he comes off a shit, I mean nothing, but nothing, then that tells you more about him than if I could tell you more.” Because he wasn't all that bad.

But he seems horrible.

Well, he was fairly horrible. Maybe I was just closer to that particular villain—as far as I'm concerned—than to any of the others. Maybe I should have more unredeemed characters. I'm beginning to think they're too nice. But, see, the reason for what you call compassion and all of that, in my work and in things I saw, at some point I'd see an out-and-out villain, and I'd say, “Oh, come off it. No one is that black and no one is that white. Let's grey them out a little bit.” I'd see someone who was essentially evil and I'd say, “What do they want? And what are their redeeming qualities?”

You mean you'd ask yourself quite systematically?

Yeah. It can't be that black and white. What is under that, and what causes that? As soon as you investigate where some horrible behavior comes from, then the character begins to round out and everyone sort of rounds out till there are no villains.

Carl, for example, does the worst thing that anybody could possibly do …

Oh yeah, Carl is a mass murderer.

And yet you can feel pity for him. But Douglas …

Oh, well. That's one of the best characters I've ever written, Carl. I've written about eight really good theater characters and Carl is one of them.

I was going to say that Douglas is so overwhelmingly repulsive that …

Is he? Oh, good. I'm not feeling particularly kind to him today. … I wrote that as best I could, and couldn't go back and do it any different.

Who are the other seven or six good characters?

I think Gloria in Gingham Dog is a wonderful character. She's a very beautiful, well-rounded character. I think you know that person.

Yeah, I agree.

And Matt Friedman in Talley's Folly. It's almost a better role than he is a character, but I think he's really a very good character too. Who else? There are three or four really good roles in Hot l [The Hot l Baltimore], but they're not really characters.

Who in the latest one, Angels Fall?

There may not be one that I consider that. But right under that is all of them. Certainly the professor.

I was very moved by his speech doubting his academic calling.

That comes from one term of teaching summer school, and talking to the professors in the professors' lounge.

How long ago?

Just about four years ago. I think he's a terrific character. Doherty is too. But I really think Niles …

He's harder to make sympathetic.

Yeah. It's really a deeper examination of a character than Doherty. Doherty has a simple life. It's pared down and by design simpler. Still it could probably be more interesting than that. But Niles is very close. I don't know if he's quite that good or not. There are some others.

There's a kind of bonding, isn't there, between Niles and the Indian?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. A kind of bonding is exactly right. There are very strong similarities. There are strong similarities between so many of the characters, and one aspect of one character is very sympathetic to another aspect of another character. I like that very much—where Doherty and Niles and the Indian all sympathize with certain areas of Zappy and Zappy reflects all of them in one way or another.

Leslie Fiedler has a thesis in an essay that's become a classic of literary criticism, called “Come Back Ag'in to the Raft, Huck Honey” and …

He wrote that? I know that essay.

His idea is that the central myth in American literature is of homoerotic love between two men of different races. And also that women are not at the passionate center of American literature.

We've certainly seen that, the bonding of two disparate men. It's true, there's a very strong thesis. We've seen it in all those movies—The Sting, Sundance Kid, and all of that. It's a very interesting essay.

You know it?

Yeah. I'm from Missouri, don't you know—Mark Twain territory. I've been to Hannibal, I've seen that river there.

Is there anything that anybody can do to get playwriting out of its position as stepchild of the literary arts in this country?

We're so easily dismissed at the time. We're only considered at the time. All of the literary critics are into something very different from my work, that's for sure. They're into Pinter.

I don't think they're really much into any contemporary dramatists.

They're into things they can write about. It's almost a vested interest. Our plays are interesting to them years later. But when they see them they can dismiss them. Who said—Gide, was it, who said, “Don't understand me too quickly”? I think we're being understood too quickly and on a very superficial level. Some of the plays that we're working on take as long as novels. Some of the plays that I've written have taken four or five years, and they've been worked out very carefully. And they're dismissed in a short paragraph in the Partisan Review. The academic mind is analytical and I don't think it can cope very well with current events, with things that are happening now. Like, the behavior at that table [Wilson indicates nearby table of people in the café] is more interesting than all the plays of Shakespeare, but they couldn't possibly cope with that. They can spend their life analyzing Cleopatra, but they can't cope very well with the present moment. Theater is the present moment. That's happening now. And I think when they see it they dismiss it. They're not really seeing what has been put into the work.

None of us are taking the risks we should be. It's never chancy enough, never risky enough. You're never out on a limb. While you're working on it you think you are, and you're trying to go as far as you can with something. And when you get it all finished, you say, “It's so safe.”

Is that because of concern for the box office?

No, no, God no, you don't think of that at all. I'm in an insulated situation where it doesn't matter at all. I don't care if they go uptown. Going uptown's such a hassle, because right away they start replacing people and then you don't have what you worked so hard to create in the rehearsal. You don't have that magical ensemble.

I meant are you concerned that you won't get put on?

Oh, see, I'll get put on. I'll get put on and run for the subscribers. I guess we always feel this about ourselves: I want to not be put on. I want to have people get up and leave. No one gets up and leaves. They only leave out of boredom. Of course, they always say it's boredom. You know, 16 people take off their clothes and stab each other, and people get up and leave because they say they're bored. And it's not really bored at all. They unplugged and therefore are not hearing anything. Not nearly risky enough. Some of my earlier things were riskier.

In what ways?

I can't say it. It just seems so tame. The reason I wrote Hot l Baltimore is that I'd finished writing Serenading Louie, and aside from not wanting to write another tragedy, the one thing I was dissatisfied with was they're so goddam suburban. They're so pale, they've got no color to them. They're all beige. They're beige and they're chic and they have well-rounded sentences, and we're trying to get to the underbelly of them. Just such chic people. I want to write the way Dickens did, I want to write outrageous characters. And that's how Hot l Baltimore came about. I was trying to write more outrageous characters. The characters in Serenading Louie were just too damned socially acceptable.

What might be both your glory and your handicap is that you're always charming. Is that what you mean?

That's even more insidious. That I feel after Angels Fall. It's certainly true of Talley's Folly. They're funny and they're warm and they're human and they're in love. And, damn it, they're charming. I am very pleased with Don Tabaka in Angels Fall because people say, “Well he's just so belligerent, I didn't like him.” Wonderful! Great! I've actually written a character, then, that maybe didn't have charm. I don't think he has much charm. Every once in a while a little bit of something cracks through, but not in that same charming kind of way. I'd like to think I've written at least one character in the last six years that wasn't completely charming, because Zappy is charming and Marion is charming and all the others are charming in one way or another. But Don is a little more abrasive.

Is that charm one of the reasons you're sometimes compared to Chekhov? Or is it the elegiac note?

Do you know, I hate being compared to Chekhov? It's because we're both trying to concentrate on character and theme and story—although they say we aren't—and action be damned in a way.

And atmosphere?

Yeah, action be damned, but atmosphere all over the joint. And I love him a lot and can't come up to his ankles, but one day. … I'm after Chekhov's and O'Neill's ass, right? Chekhov is charming. Couldn't write a negative character that wasn't charming in some way if he had to. If that's my heel, then I'll limp on it. But I haven't thought that. At the same time I had wanted to write a negative character. I would like to write an Iago. I would like to write a son of a bitch. You say Douglas is. That gives me great hope. I'm going to try to do it again, either in A Tale Told or in the one after. The next original play—if I ever write again: I worked too hard, too continuously on the last one [Angels Fall]—is going to be a play for Lindsay Crouse. She's one of the best people in our company, and the only play she's been in of mine is Serenading Louie. She played Gabby. She and Tanya Berezin are the two ballsiest actors I've ever worked with. Tanya plays Marion in Angels Fall. Now, that's ballsy. In Brontosaurus she damned near cracked the antique chair—I would have killed her because it was my chair—gripping the back of it in that last speech when she says, “Get out of my house.”

In Brontosaurus she says, “Maybe the reason I don't live with anybody is that I don't want anybody to foul up my nest.” That's the Craig's Wife syndrome, but in Craig's Wife she's horrible. In Brontosaurus the Dealer is a very sympathetic figure.

Yeah. What about the other character, the nephew? He is very strange, isn't he?

I felt a lot of menace in him and you're not supposed to, are you? But he scared me.

No, I think there is. Do you know, it's interesting you should say that, because I said once and I'm toying with this—I have a thought for a thriller, and if I write it, it's going to be another Serenading Louie and I'm going to be sorry I ever touched it, right? But I said, “What if that nephew, instead of being, theatrically at least, passive, were active? What if he were a terrorist?” Instead of a benign terrorist, what if he were an active terrorist? Of course, he's antithetical to everything she believes in, though there was a speech that I think I did not get in. She says, “How can I relate to someone who thinks that the most perfectly crafted Louis Quinze chair is just waiting for the time when that wood decays back into the earth and becomes useful?” And that's his philosophy. That didn't get in there, but …

The feeling did.

The feeling's in there. You certainly know that those are the two points of view. So I said, what if he were an active terrorist? And had at least one sidekick and got maybe another one during the course of the play. What if they were not in New York City but way out somewhere, like in Montauk, where the houses are a quarter of a mile apart in some of those areas. And then I put an architect buddy into it, who is 70, and the two people are so weak, they would essentially be held hostage and would have to get out of it in some way. It's very exciting to me. The thing that isn't exciting to me is that it's one of those plays—it's Desperate Hours or any of those others. But still, with her, and this architect, and the other guy. He is threatening in some way, you know, and maybe if he were just insidiously threatening, strangely threatening, so that you didn't quite know, rather than being overt. I think there's a perfectly fabulous thriller in that, and with all of my potential dialogue I'll be able to fuck up, right? I'll be able to completely ruin a great commercial idea.

But you won't start with a plot. Even when you talk—you have a great plot for a thriller, and you end up talking about a character.

It's not a plot at all, it's character. And I would have to, I guess, in that kind of play. I've sat in front of those plays in awe. I sat in front of the first act, at least, of Deathtrap in awe. Shocked and thrilled and so excited. I couldn't believe my eyes. How on earth can anyone do that? I think it's one of the most perfect things that's ever been written—the first act of that. And finally, at the very last line of the act, you understand what everything is. Everything has been a hoax. Then, of course, the second act has the reaction from that, and that's not so effective. That's miraculous, and you have to be excited about it and in awe of it, because I could not possibly do that. I could sit down with numbers and a chart and a book telling me how to do it, and I couldn't do it.

But that's Sardoodledum, too, isn't it?

That's Sardoodledum, yeah. But I'm in awe of Sardou, of all those people. I love it, because it's something that I couldn't do if I tried. And I'll probably have to steal someone else's plot if I ever write that kind of a play. I'll have to take a Sardou. Wouldn't that be nice? And the audiences will be bored out of their minds and say, “Nothing happened!” which they always do anyway.

This is another aspect of everything that I write I've experienced in one way or another. When I had The Gingham Dog typed up by Studio Duplicating Service, the first time I'd ever had anything professionally typed, I went in to pick it up and they said, “seventy-three dollars” and I wrote out a check and gave it to them. And I had this box of scripts. I wasn't even excited about seeing what they looked like anymore because he didn't say, “That is one hell of a script.” He hadn't liked it. Probably hadn't even read it, you know, but he didn't say, “The typist said this is really …” Nothing. They were the first people to read the script and they said nothing about it. I was destroyed. I couldn't believe it. I went home and sat around and smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of coffee and didn't open the thing. I had opened it in the cab and looked at it and said, “That really looks professional.” I didn't take them out of the box for about two days. Didn't show them to anyone.

You know, all writers are like that. They're saying, “Love me, love me.”

Like it! Love me, slove me, you know. Like the work, respond to the work. Say, “I know that,” or “You said it in a way that I couldn't have said,” or “I understand that, you're talking about me, you're not alone.” And that is the speech in The Mound Builders when she says, “I had a little typist come in and type it up for me. And I gave her the check and she left and I threw it in the closet and got drunk for four days and wouldn't answer the door.” And he says, “Because it was finished?” and she says, “Because I thought she hadn't liked it.” Two lines that got gasps from the audience, and Tanya Berezin said both of them. That's one. The other one is in Serenading Louie, they're talking about how wonderful it was, Mary and—Tanya's all wrong for Mary but she played Mary here. She played her brilliantly, but Mary should look like a homecoming queen and Tanya just does not.

What was the line?

Oh, this works out of context. The other line in [The] Mound Builders works in context. They're talking about how wonderful it was when they were serenading Louie “back then” at the beginning of their romance and how wonderful it was sleeping together when he went back to school to get his degree. There's this long description of sex with Carl, waking up and having sex again in the morning. She turns to the audience and says, “I don't really think I loved him then. But I love him then now.”

That's a wonderful line, and a wonderful idea too.

The audience went “Oh!” en masse. The other one was “Because I thought she hadn't liked it.” And the audience, en masse, went “Shiiit.” It was really something when she hit it right.

You don't write these plays in isolation, do you?

I work well with all of this energy around, and I write in the office often. But I'm cutting out, you know, I'm using the energy and I'm not hearing anything when I'm working. It's just me and the characters and the time, and then I unplug and hear everyone. And I work like that until they begin to get on my nerves. Then I go out to Sag Harbor and I work in isolation until I say, “I am so lonely I can't stand it. Is anyone involved in the theater any more?” Then I go back and everyone's rehearsing for things and I'm very excited and energized again, until I say—and it's usually three or four weeks—I say, “I can't stand all of this damned irrelevant noise.” Usually it's because I've plugged into something very strongly and I'm trying to develop a new character or a new idea, and I can't with that much noise around. So I go back out to Sag Harbor and work out in isolation again.

But I don't work in isolation, do I? I have them read me a lot of the scenes, over and over and over again as I'm trying to get them, and then other scenes I don't at all. They never see them until they see the whole script.

You have specific actors in mind.

Oh, yeah, I don't work in a vacuum. I have actors in mind. The character comes first and then I say, “Who could play that?” and “Oh, God, that would be perfect for …” Then I have that actor in mind to play the part so that I can say, “You're awfully tall to keel over in that way,” because I know Fritz Weaver is awfully tall. And that line played by someone who's perfectly all right for the part, but isn't tall, will have to be cut. It can certainly be cut without losing anything.

Has anyone been in your plays as long as Tanya Berezin?

Michael Warren Powell—I came to New York with Michael and a guy named Dean Morgan. And Michael was in a number of plays of mine. He was in So Long At the Fair and Home Free! and …

Speaking of outrageous, Home Free! is pretty outrageous.

But those are so early. You know, I go back and look at those and say, “Oh, my God, why aren't I outrageous anymore!” I thought I was going to be more outrageous with the professor [in Angels Fall] but he's so civil. He's just so socially acceptable. Even if he is flipping out. I have to get a little more unacceptable. Good Lord, if we were happy with ourselves, what would we do?

You wouldn't be an artist.

No. Well, we wouldn't be able to do the next one. We'd just rest on the old laurel.

Is The Mound Builders your favorite?

Yeah. The Mound Builders is my favorite, Serenading Louie is Marshall's favorite. The Mound Builders is just damn old deeper than anything I've done. It also does what I intended to do. As I said, I started out to write something and finished it and said, “By God, I wrote that. I really did do that.” There are things in Mound Builders that I didn't know. They say things I didn't know until I wrote them. I don't know where they came from. And there are fun technical things in The Mound Builders that I just jump up and down about, that are invisible to an audience. There's one section where—I say the play is about work—within a page, a scene has been going on and another scene has been going on and then they all come back through the room, and within a page everyone's work has been mentioned. August goes off to raise money with the kid—he's going to meet some bank president. “Just tell him we'll name it the First Bank of Carbondale Village, that might do it.” He goes off to raise money. Dan goes back out to the dig, Cynthia starts to go back out to the dig, and has this cutting conversation, the only one, with the gynecologist, Jean. She's saying, “Get back to your own work and stop doing his,” and Jean says something like, “Well, it didn't bother you”—Cynthia has her photographic equipment all around—“you're still working.” And Cynthia says, “Yeah, I have several thousand pictures of Kirsten” or something like that. She implies that she had intended to be a photographer, I mean, to be an artist. And Jean says, “Had you thought about a photographic career?” and Cynthia says, “No, no, forget I ever mentioned it.” Anyway, in that tangle of people going through, the work of every single person on stage is mentioned, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—like that [knocking table], and I had been leading up to it for 15 minutes, to get them all into that position. Well, I just jumped up and down. It's just this ganglia of the theme of the underbelly of the play. Would anyone notice that? Of course not. But what a thrill that was to get that in.

People don't write about work, do they?

Well, certainly not why we work. I do it a whole lot.

I remember reading an essay by George Orwell, saying that Dickens wrote a lot about working classes but he never wrote about what they did. He never really wrote about the working.

Interesting. My very first thought, of course, was Our Mutual Friend that begins with the man and his daughter collecting bodies off the Thames, which is what they do. That's their work. And sell them to the hospital for experimentation.

In both The Mound Builders and Serenading Louie, for some reason, which you say are your favorites …

I like 5th of July, I like Hot l. I think they're very entertaining and important in saying things I'd always wanted to do. But those are the two best. Both commercially unsuccessful.

Were they? I'm thinking about the bull mask and the god-king mask in those two plays.

Interesting. Hadn't thought of it. Only two times I've used masks. That cow mask that he thinks is a bull mask is very scary. And nothing like that flashlight flashing on him when he turns around like this, and has that gold mask on. He's in shorts, has on very little. It's very scary. All that is very scary.

That's a thriller.

Oh, that's a thriller. But that's what the other one would end up like, and that's not what I had in mind at all. That's what I mean when I say I map out a thriller, and then it'll end up being another Mound Builders and everyone will say, “I thought he was going to write a thriller.” That's not a thriller the way anyone understands thrillers. It would be a thriller for me.

The plots of many are just as banal—I'm thinking of the Huxley book. What's the name of it—The Genius and the Goddess or The Genius and the Showgirl? The Genius and the Goddess, I guess. Bo-ring! Stupid little story. With that accident out on the … ? Oh, give me a break! Talk about ridiculous coincidence. The same people who would write an essay on The Great Gatsby and take it terribly seriously would dismiss Angels Fall completely, because I had used the same format that William Inge used for Bus Stop.

You mean the idea of people clustering together?

Caught in a trap like a rat, yes. It's funny. When I realized the kind of play Angels Fall was, I said, “Oh, shit, I hate that kind of play. Oh, I don't like that sort of thing—trapped in a trap like a rat. God, I hate that sort of thing.”

It's a classic device though.

Yeah, of course it is. You know, it's The Tempest. Shipwrecked on an island. And a dozen other shipwrecked plays. But do they bring those up? No. They say Petrified Forest—you know, where you're at gunpoint—Petrified Forest and Bus Stop. Anyway. … Of course it is. I don't really mind it. I say, “Oh Lord, it falls into a category,” and you don't really like to do anything that you know is going to fall into a category. But you can't worry about that. You have to rise above it. I mean, you're writing about the characters and the world we live in, and if the peg falls into that particular hole in one aspect, you just have to be damn sure that you write as honestly and as uncomplicatedly as you can. And to say, “Well, that's not a bad hole to fall in.”

Do you mind when they compare you to Tennessee Williams?

Well, I grew up loving Tennessee Williams and I worked with him a couple of times and I liked him. You know, if they liked Tennessee Williams better, I wouldn't mind them comparing me to him. But they hate Tennessee Williams, so why should. … Oh, they hate everything he did in the last fifteen years since Night of the Iguana. Do I mind? I don't like being compared to things, because it's a way of dismissing something. As soon as you can say, “Oh, that's like something,” then you don't have to look into what it is. It's like something else. Therefore, everyone else has already analyzed all of this, so everything that they say applies to this. Bullshit! It doesn't at all. It's very different.

It's a way of getting a handle on things, like stereotyping.

Yeah, like stereotyping. It's grabbing a handle, grabbing a quick handle and dismissing it for that. I'm not at all like Tennessee Williams. I'm very different from him. I think we both are concerned about theme and language and time. But I don't think I write any more like Tennessee Williams than I write like Dickens or James Saunders or Faulkner or Fitzgerald or any of those.

Are your characters based on specific people?

Sometimes it's people I've seen, then I've seen someone else that's very like that, and the second time reinforces and finally it imprints it. Like the professor, and like Gloria in Gingham Dog. And any number of people for Matt Friedman [in Talley's Folly]. He's made up of about six very specific, different people.

Speaking of stereotypes, when I started to read your plays I thought, “He must be a Southern writer. He tells stories.”

And there are people who say I don't know how to tell a story. Every time I write something there's one reviewer who says, “Oh God, I wish Lanford Wilson would collaborate with someone who could write a good play, because his characters and dialogue and sense of place are always better than anyone could touch. But he doesn't know how to write a play.” I'm incapable of writing the sort of play that he wants.

What does he want?

Tight action. This happens and then that happens. What they're really asking for and don't know how to say it, is what E. M. Forster said you have to have in a novel. This happened and then that happened. They want event, event, event, event, event. In some of the collage plays I do that. I hope I still have the ability to do that, because I'd like to do an event play again. It would be interesting to see how I could get event, event, event with a deep character development. I'd like to do a picaresque play again too. I haven't done that in a while.