A: The play is about the titular Guadalupe, a Mexican mother who just lost her daughter and now has to deal with being in this country and not really knowing the language and then also having to deal with the grief-stricken American husband her daughter left behind too.
The inspiration for this play was basically how I grew up and seeing my own parents struggle with language barriers. I was raised within an immigrant family where the kids all spoke English (including with one another) and the only Spanish in the household was solely with my parents. Eventually I started to wonder if this ever made them feel isolated or even lonely. How did it feel to not have a literal voice in the world sometimes, even with those you love? This play is ultimately an attempt to give voice to that experience.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: The piece I’m working on currently (“School Play”) is a sort of treatise on how race, gender, and sexuality is treated in theatre. (Yes, I’m writing a play about theatre). I’ve been struck for a while about the arguments we have about representation (we aren’t producing enough writers of color or women, this play has characters whose identities are nothing more than stereotype). I wanted to tackle these issues not within one isolated group but within all of them, and hopefully broaden the discourse that sometimes isn’t had laterally with each population.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: I was pretty much always a well-behaved kid, but apparently there was one night where I refused to take a bath and I kept rebelliously standing up in the tub. My mom got so frustrated with me that she grabbed onto my hair tightly and sternly told me to sit down. Without missing a beat I looked at her dead in the eye and a single tear came running down my cheek. She said she could never punish me again after that.
In short, I am one sensitive little bastard (even when I’m in the wrong…) And that sensitivity, for better or worse, really does kind of translate into how I operate and write plays.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Oh man, I miss seeing big, ensemble casts. Like 10+ characters. Totally wish that happened more. Seeing shows now with like 6 characters, I’m like ‘oh my god, how did they do that!’
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Thornton Wilder- for his time, he was doing some truly innovative stuff, all the while preserving a sense of humanity we could all connect to. I also weep whenever I see those videos about Shakespeare programs in prisons. How can you not be moved by these men who find expression and even purpose by doing theatre? Isn’t that what this whole thing is all about?
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Ambitious plays. Plays where I really see writers take a risk with what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. I don’t think we talk about big ideas and even uneasy topics as much as we should. Also, I get very, very excited when I see a cast onstage that isn’t all white, halleloo!
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Never isolate yourself because you “have” to write. What the hell are you writing about if you deny yourself the company of people?
Q: Plugs, please
A: Guadalupe is part of LARK Playwrights Week next week, Thurs. Sept. 26th @7pm. It’s directed by Daniella Topol who is every kind of amazing.
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A: Deacon Of The Bronx follows the return home of a beloved son, Fab. After a couple of years in the seminary - which is essentially college for those men who wish to become priests - he comes back to his old neighborhood amidst some serious confusion about what he thought was his "calling". I wanted to write the play for a couple reasons: one is that I just haven't seen too many plays in recent years about people who live in the boroughs of new york city - not people who moved there recently to open a high-end coffee roaster in the middle of a leather factory, but the folks who've called it home for more practical purposes for decades now. And strangely, the Bronx has been rather shut out of the whole recent sweep of borough gentrification. It still kind of exists as it did 20-30 years ago. For better and for worse.
I also wanted to take a look at why there'd been such a marked decline in those entering the priesthood in recent years. I'd figured that between the parallel wars we've been fighting and the dragging economic slump, more men would be jumping into spiritual community leadership. Or at least, more men would want to remove themselves from the noise of our current reality, quieting themselves and their surrounding world down. But it's been the reverse. I thought it'd be fun to look at that through the eyes of Fab, his friends and family, and see what keeps a man in the "real" world. And what can drive him from it.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I just competed this residency with the Civilians' R&D Group - where I'm expounding on this musical about Barabbas. Barabbas was the guy who went free (via public vote) when Jesus was condemned to die. I always thought that was such an interesting historical fork-in-the-road. And Barabbas is not really explored much in the Bible - there's only a couple sentences about him. So I'm playing with a "And Then What Happened?" kind of story. With rock songs. It's been fun.
I'm also setting out on a new play about a middle-aged white teacher chauffeuring his black student to protect him from the social wars at school.
Also, in the middle of editing this very fun film project I did with Sean Christopher Lewis. We wrote this movie, shot it on the road on a shoestring budget this summer. Watching that come together has been very exciting.
And with Slant Theatre Project - a company I'm in with Wes Grantom, Adam Knight, and Mat Smart - I've got this ongoing hosting/writing thing called On This Island. It's an NYC Storytelling series, mixing fiction, personal essay, music, play, and film. We've had a standing show at Ars Nova for the last year, release it as a podcast, and have had stellar guests working outside their usual specialties. That whole thing really fills my cup.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: When I was younger, we couldn't really afford summer camp or anything like that, so my folks would dump me upstate where my grandparents lived for weeks at a time. And my grandparents were (and are, my grandmother Maddalena is still wonderfully alive) spectacular storytellers. They've really led the whole hero's journey - poor beginnings in the hills of northern Italy, where you'd eat things like "moon cheese" - a spot of moonlight on a kitchen table that you could dip your bread into, imagining it was cheese.
And from there, the boat over to New York where some pioneering relatives brought news of actual work. Then, washing dishes and bussing tables at midtown restaurants, sewing fabrics in the West 30s all day, saving some coins and slowly, steadily, building a life together through broken English.
I'd learn all these stories over the long Italian lunches up in the country.
But one thing really comes to mind.
It was late July and I'd been up there for some time. And I was bored and restless. I was a sporty kid with a lot of nervous energy and there's only so much catch you can play with your 55-year old grandmother. I think she had sniffed out the malaise in my my 6-year old heart. I missed my brother, who was back at home. I missed my friends. I missed my parents. So my grandmother, asked, "Hey, how about we go fishing?" I loved fishing and she knew that, so I jumped up and was like, "Yeah!"
We packed a lunch box, put on our fishing caps, got a couple of janky rods and set out.
So we started walking down this country road, cars passing occasionally and I realized that, wait, we'd never gone fishing around here. The only times we went anywhere really, was when my grandfather was up there too with a car. My grandmother could not drive. I asked, "Where do we fish around here?" And she was like, "Oh, I know a place... just a little more walking."
The weather had started to turn. As it darkened, she asked what kind of fish I liked. How we waned to cook it once we caught it. What kinds of bait I was gonna use. We started digging for worms - futilely - on the side of the road.
The sky darkened. It was clear it was gonna pour on us. But still she kept saying, "No I think the pond is somewhere up the road! Come on!" By then, I knew we wouldn't find any pond before the rain took us. And it did. It started thundering and lighting like crazy. I got scared, but my grandmother just started to laugh. It poured on us. This 6 year old kid and his 55 year old grandma on the side of a country road with a tackle box and 2 fishing rods. Just a ridiculous scene. She was laughing really hard. And I did too.
Years later, she told me that she knew there was no fishing pond around, but she felt bad for me and wanted to get me out of the house. So she mocked up a little fishing trip and, though no fishing was to be had, it was the best fishing trip I'd ever been on.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Actors should have a quote for every play they do in the city. So, if you do your first professional gig in town, you get the Equity minimum for that theater. But for your 2nd pro gig, you'd get the Equity minimum for that theater (even if it's a different one), but you'd get an extra $25 a week, say. For you 3rd pro gig, you'd get the minimum plus $50. For the 4th gig, you'd get minimum plus $75. And so on. This feels fair, establishes a sense of progress, and I don't think it would break the theater's bank. A quote system, basically. This can be done. It has to, because the meager percentage raises we get after Equity negotiations do not keep up with the soaring cost of living in this city.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes:
A: I'd say that John Patrick Shanley was a great influence on me. The first time I read his plays was the first time I felt grabbed a work of drama. Nicky Silver too. I'd never really laughed so much from reading a play. And I always felt - and still feel - that his work is so sneakily stirring and profound. His "Pterodactyls" was a real special read. A couple others are David Greenspan, whose work seems to find a way to bend time - it's miraculous. His solo show "The Myopia" blew my mind. And John Kelly's work is always mesmerizing. Those are some.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Stuff from the gut. Stuff that feels like it could've been written in one sitting, to be honest. But on the flip side, I've always gone in for the more daring, experimental work produced by the likes of The Foundry, Richard Foreman, and the like. Just unique, unsafe, nearly freaky theatrical voices that play with form.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Well I'm only several years into classifying as even a peripheral "playwright". But coming from it as an actor, I will say that nothing has helped my acting more than doing improv and writing plays.
Q: Plugs:
A: My play, Deacon Of The Bronx, is part of the 2013 Lark Playwrights' Week. Public reading is Wednesday, 9/25 @ 3pm. And listen & subscribe to Slant Theatre Project's ON THIS ISLAND podcast series on itunes - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-this-island/id580211869 - recorded live at Ars Nova.
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A: The basic story of Disgraced tracks the unraveling of a Pakistani-American corporate attorney's marriage and career as the long-guarded secret of his Muslim origins comes out at work. The body of the play is a dinner party where a group of successful New York professionals begin to talk about Islam, and Amir, under extreme stress from his work situation, begins to unloose long-stanched emotions related both to his Islamic heritage -- which he is profoundly at odds with -- but also with being Muslim in America.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I have a new play going up in 2014 at La Jolla Playhouse and at Lincoln Center's LCT3 in New York. It's called The Who & The What, and is a partly comedic exploration of Muslim-American matrimonial mores. Also at work on a heavy rewrite of a play called The Invisible Hand. It has new productions in Seattle and Portland at the end of next summer. Have a couple of commissions I am plugging away on, as well as my next novel. I'm keeping busy.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: This is a story I've told a few times. But it's really the central one when it comes to my story as a writer. I had an amazing high school teacher who changed my life, who made me want to write. Her name was Diane Doerfler. (We called her Ms Doerfler.) She was in her late fifties at the time that I took her class, an eccentric, remarkable woman, who lived on sixty acres of land in forest-country north west of Milwaukee, with a farm-sized garden she awoke at four AM to tend every morning, usually surrounded by her ten great danes. She'd been married five times, divorced all her husbands, and carried herself with an assuredness that belied her station as a high-school teacher. Her bearing was at once regal and acute. She didn't suffer fools well. And she didn't take kindly to kids who didn't do the evening assignment. Suffice it to say, I don't recall a single incident of insubordination in her class.
Our first assignment that semester was to read Friedrich Durrenmatt's short story, "The Tunnel." It's about a man who wakes up on a train and doesn't understand how he got there, or where the train is going. He goes from car to car, asking the passengers, the conductor, the workers, but no one seems to know. Most don't care and shrug. Others point to someone else further up the chain of command for an answer. Finally, having made his way to the locomotive, the protagonist finds the driver: A madman shoveling coal maniacally into the engine. The protagonist asks him where the train is going. All the driver can do is point at the ceiling. The protagonist climbs the short ladder and peers over the perch to see: A tunnel of darkness into which the train is headed with unstoppable fury.
I hadn't the slightest idea what to make of it. When Ms Doerfler strode purposefully into class the next day, her right hand buried -- as it always was -- in her sport coat pocket and playing with a set of keys there, she asked us to explain the meaning of the story. I was confounded. I couldn't understand how anything so incoherent as the story I'd read the previous night could have a meaning. No one had an answer. And so she proceeded to explain: The train was life. And sometimes we awaken to the question of where it is headed, how it began. Unfortunately, as we look for an answer from others, they often have no interest in the question, and those who might have an interest have no answer. The most that one could do was to confront the truth -- after great effort -- and that was itself a conundrum: That life is unknown headed into a deeper unknown.
I was stunned. I remember the moment I understood what she was saying. It was like lemon juice on the surface of milk, parting the murkiness, revealing something clear underneath. It struck me then (and it still does) that giving shape in stories to the deeper questions of existence was the most remarkable thing I could imagine doing.
Ms Doerfler responded to my newfound passion with care and guidance. I spent a great deal of time around her my senior year, doing independent studies and writing essays about what she had me read. She introduced me to Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Albert Camus, and Franz Kafka. And when I was done with those, she had me read Sartre and Rilke and Mishima and Proust. It was a baptism in world literature, a formation I still draw from everyday...
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: Ticket prices!
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Eleanora Duse, Andre Gregory, Arthur Miller, Jerzy Grotowski, David Mamet, Ariane Mnouchkine, Kate Valk, Tony Kushner, Solomon Mikhoels, Ibsen, Reza Abdoh, Jean Genet, Anatoly Vasiliev, Kazuo Ohno, Cherry Jones, Bertolt Brecht.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Theater that takes audience engagement seriously, which isn't to mean work that panders to the audience. It's a matter of who the primary interlocutor of the work really is. Is it dramaturgy, form, the process of storytelling? Or is it the audience? To me, this is the distinguishing line. Not that the former isn't valid. I admire so many writers whose primary interlocutor is really the form. But I find that it just doesn't excite me as much.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Keep at it. Stay open to criticism from those you admire and trust. Work hard. Expect that it may take much much longer than you would ever imagine. Show business is about attrition more than anything else. You have to have the staying power -- which I associate with creative drive -- to keep at it.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: Little, Brown and Company is bringing out an edition of Disgraced the second week of September 2013. Aasif Mandvi -- who starred in the play at Lincoln Center -- will be joining me for a reading and discussion at the Union Square Barnes and Noble on Thursday Sept 12 at 7.00 PM. Aasif is a very talented and funny guy. Should be a lot of fun. http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/81350
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