SOURCE: “Lanford Wilson.” In The Playwright's Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, pp. 277-96. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

[In the following interview, conducted on May 20, 1993, Wilson discusses his writing processes and goals, the production aspect of playwrighting, his literary influences, and his response to critics.]

Lanford Wilson was born in 1937 in Lebanon, Missouri. After attending Southwest Missouri State College briefly and spending a year in San Diego and five years in Chicago, he came to New York in 1962. His initial plays, one-acts, were presented at the off-off-Broadway Caffe Cino. His first full-length play was Balm in Gilead (1965). It was followed by The Rimers of Eldritch (1966), The Gingham Dog (1968), Serenading Louie (1970), Lemon Sky (1970), The Hot l Baltimore (1973), The Mound Builders (1975), 5th of July (1978; revised as Fifth of July [1979]), Talley's Folly (1979), A Tale Told (1981; revised as Talley & Son [1985]), Angels Fall (1982), Burn This (1986), Redwood Curtain (1992), and numerous one-acts. The Rimers of Eldritch received the Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award; The Hot l Baltimore received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Obie Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award; The Mound Builders received the Obie Award; and Talley's Folly was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Wilson is also the recipient of two Rockefeller Grants, an ABC—Yale Fellowship in motion picture writing, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Achievement Award for Theatre, an award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the State of Missouri Outstanding Artist's Award, and an honorary degree from the University of Missouri. His translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters premiered in 1984; he provided the libretto for Lee Hoiby's opera version of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke in 1971. The Migrants, on which he collaborated with Williams, was presented on television's “Playhouse 90” in 1974; and his teleplay Taxi! was presented on “The Hallmark Hall of Fame” in 1978. In 1969 Wilson, along with director Marshall Mason (who has directed most of the first productions of Wilson's plays) and others, founded the Circle Repertory Company. This interview was conducted on May 20, 1993.

[Interviewer]: Even though you're an established playwright now, how much of a struggle is it still to get your plays done?

[Wilson]: It's not a struggle to get plays done, because I write for Circle Rep so I'm writing for a specific theatre, which I consider my theatre. I'm usually writing for specific people, so there's no problem there either; the problem is thinking of a play.

But Redwood Curtain didn't start at Circle Rep, did it? It started in Seattle and then was done in Philadelphia, wasn't it?

I wrote it for Circle Rep, but Tanya Berezin, who runs the theatre, decided that it should be done on Broadway. It started in Seattle, but it was always a Circle Rep production. It took forever. As soon as Tanya decided they wanted to do it on Broadway, I just held my head and wept, practically, knowing all of the problems that it would engender.

Would you have been happier if that play had stayed away from Broadway, if it had been done at Circle Rep initially?

Yes. It would have been done three years earlier.

What was the delay?

When they decided they wanted to do it on Broadway, they said they also wanted to do it at a regional theatre first. Then Marshall and I both said that we wanted to see it at a regional theatre in a reading first to see if it held that large a stage. Very kindly we were offered the reading program at Seattle Rep, and we went out there almost a year before it was finally done. As soon as we did the reading, they said, “We love it. Can we do it in our regular season almost a year from now?” That's where it started its trip to New York.

What you're basically saying is it wouldn't have had this circuitous route had Broadway not been the ultimate aim.

Exactly. We would never have had this route. We would have just done it at Circle Rep and let it run its six weeks and be done with the damn thing.

Following up on that, how do you feel about Broadway as a goal for your plays?

I don't think it's a goal. I think the goal is to write a good play. You have to think with two heads and not simultaneously; one follows the other. First you just write a good play, and then you try to get it produced under the best possible circumstances. I never think Broadway is the best possible circumstance for a serious play. Broadway usually allows about one comedy and one, or maybe two, serious plays a year to sneak through, and they'd better be ballyhooed very heavily before they get in. That's about all the critics can cope with. That's their scope. This year we've had Someone Who'll Watch over Me as well as Angels in America.

Haven't you done very well with plays that have never gone to Broadway?

I've done perfectly well with plays that have never gone to Broadway; but I've done better with the plays that have gone to Broadway, though, just financially speaking. Redwood Curtain is already scheduled to be done next season in seven theatres, I think.

And you think that's because it went to Broadway?

I think so. Angels Fall was not done in that many.

What you're saying is that a failed Broadway production leads to more productions than a successful off-Broadway production?

I think so.

Other playwrights say that one of the reasons to go to Broadway, although this would apply equally well to Circle Rep, is that then the play gets published. They say if a play stays out of New York, it's less likely to get published. In your case, most of your plays have gone to New York, although not necessarily to Broadway. That's fascinating that Redwood Curtain, despite its commercial failure, has gotten that much attention.

I think it's a good play also, but Mound Builders has not got near that kind of play and it never went to Broadway. Serenading Louie has never got that sort of attention; it never went to Broadway. Lemon Sky, even with the television production, has not done well.

What do you think would have happened if Redwood Curtain had been done simply as a Circle Rep production and not gone to Broadway?

It probably would have done about the same as Mound Builders. But that's all just airy speculation. Who knows; I have no idea.

On balance, what would you say you feel about the fact that it went to Broadway? On the one hand, it was a financial failure; but on the other hand, its life is extended now.

People who saw it liked it very much, so I think many of the people who are doing it saw it along the way somewhere, especially if they saw it on Broadway, because it was gorgeous on Broadway. It was designed originally for that house. It was designed for that house a year and a half earlier, but it was designed for that house.

That leads to another similar question. What do you think are the pros and cons of the nonprofit theatre network as a kind of developmental laboratory—and I guess you'd include Circle Rep in there?

It depends so much on who you are. I don't know if I should try to think as a new writer coming to New York, or as myself, or as a new writer anywhere in America really. You have to take the whole regional system as well as off-Broadway; off-Broadway is part of the American regional system. I believe that a success in New York, even off-Broadway or off-off Broadway, does have a better likelihood of an afterlife than a success at South Coast Rep, where they're also doing a lot of new plays, unless it's really an extraordinary play that catches on and people start seeing and carrying on over it and it gets done everywhere.

What about the regional theatre as a laboratory, in the sense of affording you the opportunity to work on a play? Talk about the Seattle experience with Redwood Curtain. Didn't that give you more opportunity to work on the play than if you'd had to open in New York?

We were still changing things after we opened on Broadway. No matter where a play is done, if you have eyes in your head there are things you can tinker with and there are things you want to change and that you want to improve. It might just be one word or one line that you don't want in the play anymore, or a line that you've been trying to formulate for years and finally get. Just having the play on anywhere is an incredible benefit, even if it's just a lab show. We have a lab at Circle Rep that does, I guess, a play a week. Another branch of the lab does one reading a week, every Friday, and that's an incredible benefit. There are a lot of people who don't take advantage of the discussion and what they learn there, but I certainly do. I think it's very important. I've always had my plays done in the Friday readings. There's usually been a rush to get it on so I've never had a lab production of one until just about six months ago. They did a lab production of my new play, and it wasn't finished. I've finished a draft of it now, and it's a play deliberately designed for a very small room—as a result of “the Redwood trek,” I think!

You started by making a distinction between yourself and a new playwright. You had the luxury as Lanford Wilson of being able to rework Redwood Curtain right up until the end. But if you're a new playwright who's trying to get his or her play on, being able to do that in the relative privacy of Pittsburgh rather than Broadway is probably an advantage, isn't it?

Oh, of course. That was the whole idea. Imagine the luxury of doing it with eight hundred people in the audience. It's just extraordinary to be able to have that feedback, to see people storm out, and you say, “Well, I certainly have to leave that line; that line is apparently wonderfully offensive.” It's an incredible benefit. There's this odd thing that happens when you hear a play with an audience, even in the lab where there are only fifteen people in the audience. It's a brand-new play, you're very nervous about it, and they do it completely wrong. Nevertheless, these people who are listening are very well trained in making those adjustments. We also have a writer's workshop, here at my house, so you may have heard it here. We have two sessions a year, one in my apartment, where we read full-length plays just among ourselves. The writers do the reading, and sometimes we drag in a couple of actors to help.

Just hearing it with that audience you hear so much; you hear it with a different head. It's no longer in your head, it's being delivered to an audience; you hear the audience reaction and lack of reaction. In the discussions that follow—if they're at all the way Circle Rep handles the discussion—you learn so much about what the audience has received. In Circle Rep discussions, the writer's not allowed to answer any questions or you start talking about what you intended. What you are trying to understand is what the audience got, and your intentions be damned. If they did not receive what you intend, there's no point in you talking about your intentions for half an hour. Just hearing the way something was received and what it meant to someone, if they followed something as simple as the story of the play or not, is of incredible benefit in early development. Even reading series are very important to the development of a play.

When you write a play, do you picture an audience? Who do you write for?

There's a circle of people, other writers and some actors—three or four actors that I like, and possibly the actors that I'm writing the parts for. I write specific challenges for actors from time to time, but whom do I write for? It's a circle of writers; but, you know, John Guare's sitting next to Chekhov who's sitting next to Ibsen who's sitting next to van Itallie. And Shakespeare's saying, “I did that four hundred years ago.” And you're saying, “Yes, but it was never all that clear, Billy; shut up!” Chekhov is laughing his ass off, and someone else is saying, “I don't get it.”

When the reading comes and somebody says, “I don't get it,” then do you have to say to yourself, “Have I misjudged what an audience can hear?”

Or “Have I just not been clear enough?” There's a strange development of my scripts: they get much longer. A lot of people cut. I end up cutting when it gets in production; but from the first draft it probably increases a quarter at least, with me just going back and trying to explain what the hell I was talking about, because to me the story, the theme, the metaphor, and all of the rest of it are all very clear in the first draft. I find often from the discussion that no one is really following me at all. In Fifth of July, for instance, if you don't begin by saying, “It's about this Vietnam veteran who is an English teacher,” then I've not done it right. In the first draft no one said that; they didn't have a clue. They thought it was about selling the house or about God knows what. If we don't start with “It's about this English teacher who's in crisis,” then I've missed it. In the first draft, Gwen ran off with the play completely. I had to cut some of the funniest lines that I've ever written because she was just trampling on the theme of the play.

What in your mind distinguishes a legitimate comment from an illegitimate comment?

You have to know—by the time the play is finished; you may not know this until it's finished or until a short while after it's finished—what the hell you were after. I think, as a play is being written, as it's being developed in your mind and on paper, you begin to understand what you're writing and what you're trying to say. Writing, of course, is the process of understanding what you're feeling. You know generally what your play is about and what you're trying to say, and if a comment has nothing to do with that, you ignore it. There's a lot of things you hear that are irrelevant and you have to know that: “Yes, that's interesting, but it has nothing to do with the play I'm writing” or “Yes, it would probably make it a more commercial play or a more viable play for a cross-section of the American audience—whatever the hell that is—but it really has nothing to do with what I'm trying to say so therefore it's not interesting.” In other words, you don't do something just to make it popular, just to make it funny, or just to make it accessible, unless you're making your theme or what you're trying to say more accessible.

Can you think of another example from a play where you made a change because you felt that it wasn't sufficiently clear?

In Redwood Curtain, I did a lot of research about the lumber industry and had a great deal of business in the first draft which I thought was just fascinating. I thought it was fascinating because it was something I was just learning, but all of the details of that sale detracted so much from what the central image of the play was supposed to be that we just went off on a weird tangent that was completely unnecessary to the theme of the play. Much of that was cut back and simplified. A whole paragraph would go, and one sentence would become a phrase. The words “hostile takeover” took care of thousands of paragraphs of meticulous research. It just became much clearer to cut all of the details.

Using that case as an example, how did you realize that about Redwood Curtain? Was that something you, hearing the play on its feet, realized, or was that something someone else said to you?

First, Claris Nelson, one of the writers who's important to me, who gives a better analysis of a play from a cold reading than just about anyone (and she knows business very, very well; she's a business person), was sitting there and she said, “You're losing me in this forest of the lumber industry. I'm not sure it's quite like that, I start arguing with it, and I get completely off of the track. All that's necessary is, what has this done to her? Because we're trying to talk about someone who no longer knows who she is.” Of course, she was completely right and there went all of my meticulous research. She just hated it completely; and I thought she would be the one who would appreciate it the most because she understood business.

Basically, after you examined what she was saying, did you realize she was right?

Oh, absolutely, especially after the first cold reading. It was absolutely clear—because all of that was left in for the cold reading—that it didn't belong there. It had nothing to do with the theme of the play, with what the play was trying to say.

Do you think that, if she hadn't mentioned it, you would have realized it anyway?

I bet not, not for a long time, and it would have been so much more difficult to change all of that after we were in production or in rehearsal.

When that happens, is it more likely to come from someone else rather than from your own hearing of the play?

Sometimes it is, because you're really quite deaf, especially to your meticulous research, but not when you can see an audience drift completely away from it. When you have a chance to question them, they say, “I was totally lost; I was so bored by that.”

Have you ever had an instance when sitting there without anybody saying anything, without any audience reaction, you've said, “That's all wrong.”

Of course, all the time. Every line. As I say, just in the first reading of a play, you know if it doesn't sound right. The play that I'm working on now, which is a very small play and will not be done anywhere (I probably won't even ever allow it to be done) is about gigantic themes. I seem to be doing this more and more—writing very very small plays that are about huge things. But this one is a deliberately very small play about one of the most important things that's happened to mankind, and with the first reading I realized that we just don't spend enough time with the play, with the people; there's so much more information that we should have.

And you didn't realize that in writing it?

Oh, not at all. I thought it was very dense and very crabbed and very excitingly circuitous and tight. Of course, it was much too tight; it needed to breathe, and the people needed to explain themselves. Then there were a few technical things. One of the reasons I had trouble working on the project in the past—it's something I've been intending to do for about ten years—is that the central character is a woman who influenced everyone but almost never spoke. She hated speaking, she didn't talk very much, and I finally came to the conclusion that, all right, goddamn it, this is the night that she speaks! We have this character who never ever speaks who is going to talk, and this guy is going to grill her until he finds out what makes her tick. The guy himself is in such crisis that she understands that he needs to talk or he needs to listen, so for this one time she does talk to him and does talk about herself. Although she's very self-effacing, we do get the information. Also it's just necessary to get the facts of her life in there somehow, and he just unashamedly grills the woman.

So the task, then, was to make you feel that this is a woman who rarely spoke but was so incredibly wonderful in the life that she lived that she influenced all of these people. Here is a woman who never speaks who has page after page of dialogue, and how do I get you to believe that this woman really is a very quiet woman? That was not completely successful in the first draft. You felt her going on, and I realized I had to emphasize her reluctance to talk even under the circumstances. She wrote four pages of an autobiography but then said, “Who cares? It's completely unimportant. We don't need another one of these; we don't need another story about a woman who lives this particular kind of life.” So we have very little of her writing; she wrote a Christmas letter, mimeographed it, and sent it to all of her friends every year, and that's about all we have. But it's mostly about planting and the weather and what wildflowers bloomed and which didn't and very little about anything concrete; but that was her life, so there was a lot of that in it. That's why it's for a very small audience!

Is it a one-act play?

It's a very long one-act play. In the first draft it's about thirty-five or forty minutes. In the second draft it was fifty-five, and it's going to be an hour and a half by the time I finish it. There's no intermission, there can't be one.

As you look back over your playwriting career, what sort of changes do you see? What have you learned to do better? How are the most recent plays different from the earliest ones?

When I first started writing plays, I said, “Theatre should be a three-ring circus.” I wanted a lot of people, all talking at once, creating life on the stage. After we formed the Circle Company, I became more responsible to the actor. I wanted to write deep, fully rounded people, beautiful language, roles an actor could sink his teeth into. The craft became less flamboyant, more subtle. The trick now is to get some of the old panache back into a beautifully constructed work.

Why are you a playwright? Why aren't you a poet or a novelist? What specifically about playwriting appeals to you?

Well, I think we have different talents. I'm not compact enough to be a poet. I enjoy reading poetry sometimes, but sometimes I don't even enjoy reading it because it's so damned compact it goes past me; I don't get it. I think, however, I'm very strongly attracted to the craft of and the limitations of theatre. In a novel you can go on for pages about the psychological development of a person or the psychological ramifications or the political ramifications of a moment and on and on. You have to find a way to do that without saying it in the theatre, and that's just thrilling to me. The construction of a play is just incredibly difficult. Nowadays, the style is to do it without letting anyone know that you're doing it, because as soon as they see a construction they say, “Oh my God, I saw a symbol or I saw a metaphor,” as though that wasn't what we have to build with. So you have to hide all of that with great facility, and that excites me.

When I was trying to write a screenplay, I realized what a totally different animal the contemporary screenplay is. It has so little introversion. Everything is extroverted. It's a generalization, but in the popular movie people say what they mean. In a movie they might say, “I love you”; in a play they might say, “Get out of my face!” It means exactly the same thing because of inhibitions and so on, but that doesn't read at all in a film. You're just working with a completely different agenda. Filmwriting is a very difficult medium for me because I've spent all of my professional life trying to hide the things that have to be very obvious in movies. Also exposition is handled in a completely different way—you see it or you can flash back or something like that—whereas that doesn't interest me at all. It's much more exciting to try to get someone's history into a scene while the scene is always in the present tense, without the audience knowing that they're getting exposition. They just think they're learning about what is happening between these two people. I love the limitations of theatre. While it has incredible possibilities, gigantic and wonderful possibilities, still it's beautifully limited.

What about Hollywood and playwrights? Hollywood is not terribly respectful of playwrights. Why do so many plays suffer when they are transferred to film?

Because they shouldn't have been transferred, or else they should have been transferred a lot more cleverly. Sometimes it works wonderfully. There's the story of Tennessee working on Streetcar. Of course, that was the same director and the same author working on the screenplay. When they first imagined the movie, they thought it would be quite different from the play. They would open it out, they would go back to Belle Reve; it would just be a completely different experience. But as they started working on the film script, more and more it came back to just the play, and it ended with almost the text of the play. It can work but you have to be incredibly ballsy to do it. With Virginia Woolf they just cut a few of the profanities out, but other than that it's almost the script of the play. You have to be bold enough to do that or approach the story in a completely different way, but it's very difficult to tell the story and make it mean the same thing in a different medium.

A good play is a microcosm and a metaphor and has ramifications. If you start telling it in a different way, you lose one of those: you might lose the ramifications; you might keep the metaphor but you lose so much that you're better off not doing it. It's much easier to do a novel or a short story. The worse the novel is, the better off you are. A novel, generally speaking, has so much less dialogue in it that you're probably dealing with one-quarter of the lines and so you have all that room for story development. You can sit on a train for ten minutes with nothing happening, just sit looking at the ceiling. You can't do that when you're adapting a play because you're already dealing with two hours, with more words than most people think a movie can handle.

How do you feel about the production aspects of playwriting? Some playwrights feel the play is done when they finish writing it; other playwrights say it's 50 percent done when they finish writing it and the other 50 percent happens in production. Where do you fall on that continuum?

When I say it's finished, I'm about 90 percent done. I'll go through three or four drafts in a lab situation. Hearing it read to me or hearing it read to a small lab audience in the Friday readings is very important. I don't consider it finished until a couple of drafts after that. Then, when I do think we have a rehearsal script, probably 90 percent of it is there. Neither Marshall nor I feel that rehearsal is the place to rewrite a play, but we'll change small things. When we changed A Tale Told to Talley & Son, after I'd seen it in production there were a thousand things I wanted to do to it. It was beautifully produced and gorgeously acted, but it was all wrong. A Tale Told was a barn burner. It's a plotted play, it's deliberately a 1940s-style play with a lot of plot. In the first draft, the ghost of Timmy starts talking only in the second act and he starts telling about how he was killed. It's one of the best speeches I've written, but it's quite long and you just wanted to yank that kid off the stage because there was a plot going.

When you have that kind of a plot going, you're not going to stand around for something as irrelevant as how this guy got killed. That character is completely redone in Talley & Son. He was saying beautiful words and I'm sitting in the audience saying, “Will somebody please yank that kid.” In the rewrite I had to find a balance of where we can put him in and how much of that story we can have. We had much less of it, and I used him also as a narrator to fill us in on a lot of the logistics of the play. I cut way back again on the business of the family, made the family wealthier because I just needed them larger. There were a lot of changes. We were working on that through all of the rehearsals. Timothy Busfield was playing Timmy out in California, and I had him sit on a stool just as if I were drawing him, so I could look at him and try to write a speech for him. I knew exactly what I wanted him to say, and I just could not get it. He sat on the stool and I sat at the typewriter looking at him and very slowly developed the quite brief speech that he was to say. He got up at one point, not really understanding what was going on, and I said, “Sit down! What are you doing? You can't move!” He was shocked that I was using him, but it was really very important to be looking at my material.

That's fascinating, because what you're saying is that, sitting in your study, you might not have been able to do that, but being confronted by the actor in a live situation you were able to work on that character more successfully.

I couldn't have done it without that physical actor there. With the rehearsal going on in the other room, there was an urgency to the moment that fed beautifully into the work. But we didn't get the final moment of Talley & Son until we brought it back to New York and were in previews at Circle Rep. We were in previews before I realized that Timmy left and Lottie was onstage by herself. We did get that gradually she realizes he's there. He had talked to her a lot in A Tale Told; they had had conversations. They don't have in Talley & Son but, as he's talking to the audience toward the end of the play, he begins talking to her as well and we get the feeling that she's hearing it. When he walks off the stage, it's just an incredibly dramatic moment to leave her alone without that ghost that she's discovered. She's suddenly very, very lonely on that stage by herself, and I didn't understand that we had to end the play with just her until we were in previews.

Was that a result of physically seeing it and knowing it would make a wonderful dramatic moment?

The play did not end. It was not fulfilling with the lights going down with both of them onstage looking at each other. But when he said all he had to say, wandered off to some other interest, and left her all by herself, it ended the play.

Do you think you could have realized that sitting in your study?

Never.

Because you wouldn't have visualized it?

I wouldn't have visualized it; it was a completely visual thing. We almost had him open the door, but then we decided, “No, we're not going to do that because as an audience we are imagining him not there and what she is seeing. She may be seeing a vague little shadow of him; but if he opens the door, it's too startling for that moment. For another play it would be fine, but for that moment it would look ridiculous because we're imagining him not there and those doors are opening by themselves.” She has opened the door, and he hears the music from across the river and wanders out. She watches him going out, and he's gone.

It's almost like putting a note in a piece of music in the right place. It's a feeling that is beyond intellectualization in a situation like that, isn't it?

It really is. It becomes theatre. You see plays all the time that you say, “No, that's just wrong.” It's not wrong in the writing; it's wrong in the direction, and that becomes theatre. When you read a play as simple as Hay Fever, you know exactly the sound of their voices. You know exactly how this play has to be done. You see it and it's never done right. It never has the right sound, it never has the flip urbanity that that play demands. They get all bogged down in real moments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the movement and the sound of that play. You need to see something like the movie of Blithe Spirit to understand how the damn play has to be done. It can be done with different interpretations of all of the characters, but it still has to have that theatricality, that rhythm, that whatever. I've seen perfect casts of Hay Fever that should have done that play in a flick and they went way off, way off; they just ruined it, and you couldn't get a better cast.

And something can be right for one person and very wrong for another. I know when I saw the production that was generally bombed in New York of Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin and Robin Williams, I absolutely loved it. It did for me everything that that play had to do and I said, “I don't want to see this play again. I will never ever see this play again because now I've seen the play.” I had seen a dozen productions of it that weren't funny, that didn't have the poignancy. It was just cast perfectly. The child that comes in with his little backbone sticking out was so small and so young—and that is exactly right. I've seen someone much too old in that part always and it gave you a completely different feeling. Also Steve Martin, whom I don't like in movies very often, walked onstage and it almost took your breath away to see someone walk onstage that casually. He walked onstage without a single ounce of theatrical performance rhythm. He walked onstage as someone would walk across a room. Well, that just doesn't happen; everyone has to perform walking across a stage. He didn't do that. He just waltzed onstage and started talking, and it took my breath away. I was with someone else from the theatre, I don't remember who, and we were spellbound throughout the entire thing, and audiences all around us were quoting the reviews: “Oh, look how self-indulgent Robin Williams is.” I don't like Robin Williams at all in most of his films, but he was brilliant in this because it was written for a comedian and he's a comedian.

What have you learned from other playwrights living or dead?

It was fun when off-off-Broadway was just starting; I've said this before, but it's so true. I think it became a pattern; when I lost all of those playwrights or when we all went wandering away, they stayed with me and just increased and added some of the other ones I respect and I admire. If Sam Shepard discovered something, it belonged to all of us. It was, “Oh, good, we can do that, that is possible.” It was very much like we were inventing or discovering theatre for ourselves. If Megan Terry did something or Jean-Claude did something, it belonged to all of us suddenly.

I would never have written This Is the Rill Speaking if I had not read You May Go Home Again by David Starkweather, which was a completely nonrealistic play. This Is the Rill Speaking is essentially the same play. It's just my experience, my going home. David wrote a character named David who was very reluctant to go home to his sister's wedding because he didn't want to go home; he didn't want to go back there and get all embroiled in that nonsense again. The absurd mother, the absurd father, the ridiculous sister, and the even more ridiculous man that she was going to marry are all done very abstractly. The mother is mopping the floor throughout half of the play; the son is dressed as a Japanese executioner or something throughout the play and trying to cut the rope with a huge ax in his hand. He's off at a distance from them intellectualizing deeply and philosophizing deeply, and the mother's mopping the floor saying, “David, please, I've got a million things to do.” At the end he makes them all bow down; he's going to execute them with his ax. And the mother says, “Even the child? Even the baby?” “Yes,” he says, “all of you.” They all bow down, and they say, “Oh, very well, but get on with it because we're really very busy, we've got so much to do.” There's a roll of thunder and a blackout and a crash, and the lights come up immediately, and he's there in jacket and tie and ordinary shoes and a little suitcase, and they say, “Oh, you made it,” and he says, “Oh, of course I would come home.” and that's the end of the play. Oh Lord, it just ripped me apart. I saw it about fifty times, every time it was done at Caffe Cino. It made me realize that you can write about those experiences, about the incredible love that was in that play, which was filled with hate but was all about love. It was filled with horrible, horrible portraits that were all done so beautifully. That's what I took from that play.

From something of Claris's I took something else. In Brontosaurus I stole completely from a very minor play that Sam Shepard wrote. I don't remember anything about it at all except that at the end of the play, the lead guy turns to the audience and says, “And then I walked down the street and I kept walking and I started thinking and then I stopped thinking and I kept walking and then I stopped,” and he freezes in position and the lights go out. Well, it was the most dynamic thing I'd ever seen in my life. In Brontosaurus the actor at the end of the play says, “And then I went down the street and this is the continuation of the story, then this happened to me.” I had no idea you could do that.

I was working at the Phoenix Theatre and saw their production of Next Time I'll Sing to You, which was just a glorious production of James Saunders's play. He's still my favorite of all those British playwrights from back then. That and A Scent of Flowers are two of the most beautiful plays ever. One section, an entire page, was stolen verbatim by Tom Stoppard for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He just flat out stole one page of it because he needed it, I think. In Next Time I'll Sing to You, the second act begins with the longest, most ridiculous shaggy dog story you have ever heard in your life. Estelle Parsons sits on the edge of the stage, talks to the other character, and it goes on and on and on and on and on; really what it is it's a shaggy dog story. It has a ridiculous punch line. The guy's been coming on to her and she essentially is saying, “I think if someone is attracted to someone, it is perfectly all right for them to have a relationship. I see nothing wrong with that at all. If someone is attracted to someone, I think a relationship is a logical …” and it goes on and on and on like that and ends with, “The only problem is I'm not attracted to you.” It's a fifteen-minute speech.

All of the shaggy dog stories in Balm in Gilead came from that realization; there the characters usually turn to the audience. Not the girl's long speech but all of the short speeches: “The difference between people in New York and Chicago is that in Chicago no one carries an umbrella and in New York they think nothing at all about an umbrella,” which ends with “Consequently they get rained on a lot in Chicago”—all of that comes directly from that shaggy dog story in Next Time I'll Sing to You. I never would have thought of stopping the action and having a little entertaining speech with a punch line. It never would have crossed my mind. As I say, once you saw something back then, it belonged to all of us. I'm sure Megan Terry used that, and people were using things of mine as well—the simultaneous dialogue and all of that. And I don't have any idea where I got that.

As you have learned your craft, has that become less so now, or was it because of the particular moment in theatrical time where you were all going to see each other's plays?

I think maybe I'm not as facile now. I'm not able to assimilate. I'm not as easily assimilated anymore.

Are you as easily impressed?

Oh God, yes. If I'm not influenced by Angels in America, I'm not doing the right thing. I've already read both parts, and the first part (the second part's not finished yet) is one of the best plays written in America since what? Well, I think there is Long Day's Journey, then Streetcar, then Virginia Woolf, then Hurlyburly (in the rewritten script, not in the production), and now Angels in America. These are the really important poles in American theatre. Angels in America returns us right back to all of the theatrical possibilities of the stage and to the unabashed intelligence of the writer. It's just delicious! If I can't learn something from that, then I'm ossified—and it would be terrible to think that. My plays are getting more and more hard, more and more compact, like a black dwarf or something. They're getting denser and denser and denser and denser and I just have to explode. I have to get out of that. I've always felt this way. I was saying this when I wrote Serenading Louie. I'm never happy with how small the plays are; even when they're gigantic, I'm never happy with them.

Do you think that being more assimilable would help that?

No, I think I was like that in Balm in Gilead, I was like that in Lemon Sky. I think Burn This was a great advance because I finally got some of that energy from Balm in Gilead and some of those other plays back onto the stage again, got it in a character in a realistic situation.

Do you see Burn This as a less dense play?

No, the idea was to keep what I'd learned of character development and the psychology of the character and the ramifications of what I was trying to talk about but to get some of the good old-fashioned theatricality back onto the stage, even if it was just in one character, Pale.

What are your writing habits? Where do you work? For how long? At what time of day? Do you use a word processor or do you write out your work in longhand initially?

First I have to bore all my friends to tears saying, “I don't have an idea for a play.” This lasts anywhere from a year to about three. During that time I have no discipline at all. When I finally do settle down to work, I have a fairly set routine. I begin working about forty-five minutes after I get up. This could be nine in the morning or three in the afternoon. I begin by rereading what I wrote the day before—not editing too much—just to see where I was. Usually that tells me what I want to do next. I write for perhaps four or five hours, sometimes as little as three, sometimes as long as eight or nine, until I run out of gas and have no idea how to continue, or not the energy. As I work, I might make notes of things that are going to happen later—lines, events. I used to carry a notebook and I could write anywhere—on the subway, in a coffee shop, in a bar. Later I worked on a typewriter, either at the Circle Rep offices or at my apartment, or out in Sag Harbor at the house. Fifth of July was written mostly in Sag Harbor, Burn This mostly in the city at my apartment. I finally broke down and bought a primitive sort of word processor. I don't think I could write in longhand again or, for that matter, use a typewriter.

What gets you started on a play?

God, I wish I knew. Sometimes it's an image, sometimes it's a character. With Redwood Curtain it was Lyman. I met him, I saw him, I couldn't figure him out; so I had to figure out what made him tick and why we had abandoned him. He was just such a palpable symbol for the collective mental block that we have with our history. With Mound Builders, it was a moment that never even got into the play. There were people talking, they leave the stage, and you realize there have been all of these crickets, frogs, and all of these night sounds all the way through. A stick breaks and it's all suddenly quiet; all the bugs and everything shut up. In other words, there's something out there that's going to get you. That was the image that I started with with Mound Builders. I think it's probably the only time I've written a play successfully where I really wrote what I intended to write. It didn't take me off in some weird place that wasn't the first impulse. First impulses are sometimes very good just to get you started, but with that play, I really wrote about what I intended to write about all the way through and stuck to it. I learned a lot along the way. I didn't know they were archeologists when I started; I thought they were real estate developers.

With Hot l Baltimore, I started with the image of the lost trains and all of those great abandoned railroad stations and this glorious hotel that was run down. But I didn't realize it was a whores' hotel, that it was whores and retired people, until April came down the stairs and the play snapped into focus instantly. It was just the character and her voice suddenly saying, “All right, all right, what's the story this time? Last night it was something wrong with the plumbing, the day before that it was something else.” You can see it on the stage still; the play does not start until she comes down the stairs. It's almost right that it doesn't start until she comes down; she's the fourth character on, or maybe even the fifth. Marshall has said that he wants to throw away the first five pages of everything I write because it's just me trying to find my play. He's often very right. His direction of Hot l was one of the most glorious things I've ever seen in my life.

When you start a play, or when you're writing it, how much of it do you know? Do you know the end? Do you know a general outline of where it's going? Do you discover it as you go along, or does it vary from play to play?

It varies some. Generally, I find out as I go along. I'm making little marginal notes as I go along, telling me things that I've discovered: “The first act will end like this.” I may not know how the last act ends, but I get an image; or maybe I'll begin with a knowledge of how the first act ends. I have a dynamite first-act ending of a play and I don't even know what the play is, so I'll probably never write it—but it sure is a dynamite first-act ending. It's typical of my endings, these long dying falls that I end acts on instead of something dramatic. Generally, I'm discovering the play as I go along. The characters are telling me without me pushing them around too much where the play wants to go. I'm making a lot of plot notes at the same time. I don't know much about it. That's why it's so difficult to try to begin a play, because when you're thinking about a play you're thinking about the whole damn play. I haven't learned to just think about whatever it is that's going to start me writing something. I'm always thinking about the whole play. There are a dozen plays where I can see the whole play in my mind and I just don't want to write it. If I could learn where I start, I would be searching for that start rather than an entire play, because it's never an entire play that I have when I begin.

With Burn This, I started with Pale's tirade. It killed me when we finally cut the place where I started on Pale. The play was four hours long, and all we cut was Pale going on and on and on. I loved that four-hour version, but nobody wanted to do it except John Malkovich. When I started, I had the dancer. Then I did the tirade and said, “What in the hell was that?” and realized that I had a play that I was going to write for someone that I eventually decided I didn't want to work with. Years earlier I'd written the beginning of that play, and it was down there brooding in my subconscious somewhere. In that first speech that I wrote, he refers to his brother by name and I didn't even know what he was talking about. When I finally ran out of gas on that first speech, I said, “What in the hell is this?” Then I realized, “Oh, of course, that's guy I was going to write for what's-his-name.” I had the whole story. I said, “Oh, so she's the dancer and she has the boyfriend who's a movie producer and the roommate who works in advertising.” So I had the whole damn play.

You mentioned earlier that you sometimes have written with specific actors or actresses in mind. Has that increased over the years?

Less the last few years. In Redwood Curtain, I was writing this man that I had met. It was not an actor, but a person that I had in mind. I had an image that I had made up for the girl, and I was writing the aunt for Debra Monk. I knew what I was doing with her. I knew Debra's voice and all of that, but the other two, not. Burn This I wrote for Malkovich and Nancy Snyder, but Nancy decided she didn't want to act anymore. She wanted to have children, and we were just lucky enough to find Joan Allen. I also had in mind someone quite different from John Hogan, who ended up playing Burton.

But earlier on, you did much more writing for actors?

We don't have the company that we did then. It was a result of having a company. The play that I want to write now, not the one that I've finished a draft of—that's called Trinity, by the way, the play that I've finished a draft of—but the play that I want to write for Circle Rep I want to write for people who are in the lab because they're around and I know them. We have a lab membership of about 250 actors who are just incredibly good; they're very much like our original young company was. There's not more than four of the original company still in New York, probably. With the original company, I wrote not for what I thought they could do but for what I wanted to challenge them to do. Sometimes I took advantage of who they were. I wrote Wes specifically for Danny Stone because of a tiny little moment that I'd seen him do in a play called Mrs. Murray's Farm, a play that Roy London wrote which was commissioned for the Bicentennial. There was one moment where one of his bosses came in and said something and left and the other one came in and said something completely opposite and left. For one moment as the play went on, you were just left to decide which one of those he was going to do. And for one moment he went, “Uh, which one of those am I supposed to do?” And that was Wes. It was the only moment that Danny had like that, and I knew he could do that.

What is your opinion of critics? Do you ever learn anything from them? In your mind, what would be a description of the ideal reviewer? Does he or she exist?

The theatre would be better off without critics. No, I've not learned anything from a critic, but they don't write to teach the author, thank God. I'm trying to ignore critics nowadays; I've stopped reading them unless I know the review is good, and of something I have seen and liked. My ideal reviewer is Harold Clurman, and we are unlikely to ever see his like again. What he did that the others don't do was try to understand the play. He also knew what acting was.

What terrifies you?

There are a lot of things I'm troubled by. I am troubled by the idea that Circle Rep won't get a decent theatre, a larger theatre, and we need it desperately. What terrifies me is not being able to work. I'm at that age when most American playwrights stop, or start getting very strange. I have to focus now on the Arthur Millers and the ones who didn't stop and who didn't get very strange. Not being able to have another play put on, not writing another play, is always looming over you; it always has, because you don't know where in the hell it comes from. Flippantly, I say I never should have started this because now people expect me to continue doing it and I don't know what I'm doing. I never knew how to write a play to begin with and now they expect me to write another one. But beneath that, I really don't know where it comes from, and I really don't know if that muse is going to continue to buzz around and talk to me or not.

I really can't do much of anything else. I'm not a decent teacher; I can't stand up in front of people and talk, and I can't lecture. I suppose I could run an antiques store, but it wouldn't be nearly as much fun. So the idea of not being able to work terrifies me. I don't mean getting senile; that just happens. But until that point, not finding the next play scares me. I very often know what I want to write. I know what a play looks like and sounds like and generally should be, but I don't have any specifics at all. Getting the specifics is the entire thing, and so not being able to do that is very surprising.

I've never been able to write something just because I wanted to write something for someone. I was going to write something for Liz Sturges for years before I came up with Aunt Lottie. Finally, when I came up with Aunt Lottie, Talley & Son started with the image of a house where no one smokes; they smoke outside, they don't smoke inside. And they don't swear. Here is Liz Sturges walking through the room, smoking, saying, “Oh, kiss my ass.” I didn't know another thing about it, and then it turned into one of the Talley plays. I grabbed onto that image so gratefully because I'd been wanting to write something for Liz Sturges for about ten years. The drill is to find a character, then say, “Who can play that?” and then aim the writing at a challenge to that actor or take advantage of something that they do very well. That's the method now. There's an actor in the lab now who's one of the great discoveries of our time. I think he's like discovering Jeff Daniels or discovering Bill Hurt or any of the other actors who have gone on to become very famous at Circle Rep. I want very much to write something for him, but I haven't been able to come up with anything because it's not the process. The process is finding the character and then finding the actor.