Andy BRAGEN

AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDY BRAGEN2010-2011 SEASON02

From the desk of the PRODUCINGARTISTICDIRECTOR

JEREMY B. COHENProducing Artistic DirectorThe Playwrights’ Center

Cover design by Very, Inc.

ay

R CORE WRITER

eaves for camp, Victor and Nancy

er. As they struggle to communicateonnection, time telescopes forward,a simple play about a marriage

ttling and gripping dark comedywho love each other to distraction.

1 Ruth Easton New Play SeriesPM • AT THE PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER • R FREE

.7481 x10 OR INFO@PWCENTER.ORG

Project journey:

INITIAL SCENES WRITTEN IN• ELECTRIC PEAR PRODUCTIONS’ THE

OUTLET, SEPTEMBER 2007

WORKSHOP AND READING AT • SEWANEE: THE UNIVERSITY OF THE

SOUTH, APRIL-JUNE 2009

WORKSHOP WITH • JOANNA ADLER AND ROB CAMPBELL, DIRECTED

BY POLLY NOONAN, SPACE PROVIDED BY THE LOWER MANHATTAN

CULTURAL COUNCIL’S WORKSPACE PROGRAM, JUNE 2010

WORKSHOP AT • A RED ORCHID THEATRE, OCTOBER 2010

WORKSHOP AND READING AT THE • PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER’S RUTH

EASTON NEW PLAY SERIES, DECEMBER 2010

I remember this moment about three weeks after our son was born—it was 4 am, there was a wailing sound in the next room, and I turned to my partner and said: “Whose brilliant idea was it to get such a noisy roommate?!” It’s the noise that, for the past eight

our home—total joy, terror, deep swells of pride, loss, and then a constant reminder that making a family was the most powerful thing I’d ever been part of … and the most

There is a haunting in the work of our Core Writer, Andy

play of his I read years ago. There’s the life he depicts through the text, and then there’s a whole second life that exists, just beneath the skin. A pulsing. A readiness to burst

forth at any moment. It is precisely that unpredictability that draws audiences further and further into his worlds.

With this piece, Andy has arrived at something profoundly still and acutely restless and violent, all at once. To me, the play reads like a meditation on watching a life unfold, as the fulcrum of the triangle shifts and a relationship is caught in the undertow. It is at once incredibly theatrical and utterly real.

That’s been my experience of the most potent relationships in my life, that roller-coaster. And I’m thrilled to share with you Andy’s journey, a haunted poem that echoes of time.

From the desk of the PRODUCINGARTISTICDIRECTOR

JEREMY B. COHENProducing Artistic DirectorThe Playwrights’ Center

Cover design by Very, Inc.

ay

R CORE WRITER

eaves for camp, Victor and Nancy

er. As they struggle to communicateonnection, time telescopes forward,a simple play about a marriage

ttling and gripping dark comedywho love each other to distraction.

1 Ruth Easton New Play SeriesPM • AT THE PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER • R FREE

.7481 x10 OR INFO@PWCENTER.ORG

Project journey:

INITIAL SCENES WRITTEN IN• ELECTRIC PEAR PRODUCTIONS’ THE

OUTLET, SEPTEMBER 2007

WORKSHOP AND READING AT • SEWANEE: THE UNIVERSITY OF THE

SOUTH, APRIL-JUNE 2009

WORKSHOP WITH • JOANNA ADLER AND ROB CAMPBELL, DIRECTED

BY POLLY NOONAN, SPACE PROVIDED BY THE LOWER MANHATTAN

CULTURAL COUNCIL’S WORKSPACE PROGRAM, JUNE 2010

WORKSHOP AT • A RED ORCHID THEATRE, OCTOBER 2010

WORKSHOP AND READING AT THE • PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER’S RUTH

EASTON NEW PLAY SERIES, DECEMBER 2010

I remember this moment about three weeks after our son was born—it was 4 am, there was a wailing sound in the next room, and I turned to my partner and said: “Whose brilliant idea was it to get such a noisy roommate?!” It’s the noise that, for the past eight

our home—total joy, terror, deep swells of pride, loss, and then a constant reminder that making a family was the most powerful thing I’d ever been part of … and the most

There is a haunting in the work of our Core Writer, Andy

play of his I read years ago. There’s the life he depicts through the text, and then there’s a whole second life that exists, just beneath the skin. A pulsing. A readiness to burst

forth at any moment. It is precisely that unpredictability that draws audiences further and further into his worlds.

With this piece, Andy has arrived at something profoundly still and acutely restless and violent, all at once. To me, the play reads like a meditation on watching a life unfold, as the fulcrum of the triangle shifts and a relationship is caught in the undertow. It is at once incredibly theatrical and utterly real.

That’s been my experience of the most potent relationships in my life, that roller-coaster. And I’m thrilled to share with you Andy’s journey, a haunted poem that echoes of time.

WHAT, IN YOUR OWN WORDS, IS VISITING DAY ABOUT?Visiting Day is about a marriage. It’s about a child’s room, too. I think the setting is

the play, where it takes place.

WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS PLAY?In terms of the location and the set, I had done a production of a Japanese play I worked on at the Playwrights’ Center, Vengeance Can Wait, at PS122, and that play has a bunk bed featured prominently, and I kind of loved the image of a bunk bed onstage. And I had had a bunk bed as a child. So that was inspiring.

and he suddenly looked old. I didn’t really think about it; he was almost 71 at the time. But something had changed. He looked old. And I started for some reason thinking about my childhood and the years I spent at camp, because those also coincided with the years my parents’ marriage fell apart. This is not their story, but there are some aspects of it that colored it for me —that, and imagining a husband and wife at home without their only child. I am an only child, and I think that the dynamic in that sort of small family can be strange and intense. I was interested in that.

WOULD IT BE ACCURATE TO CALL THE PLAY ABSURDIST?I think it has Absurdist elements. It moves from a kind of Pinter-Albee world in

.ti fo dne eht drawot dlrow ocsenoI/ttekceB a fo erom a otni noitces tsr ehtFirst of all, I love those writers. And I think they get at some really essential things. I think about a play like Exit the King. When you peel away all the mayhem, there’s this emotional core about this husband, the king, who loves his wife. I saw it on Broadway two years ago and was deeply moved by it. I’m interested in that kind of peeling away, this idea that a play you think is one thing becomes something else. I’m interested in stylistic shifts within a script, and with Visiting Day, I tried to do that both with language and style, and on the page, with shifts of font and format.

WE TALKED WITH CORE WRITER ANDY BRAGEN IN

ADVANCE OF HIS DECEMBER 6 RUTH EASTON NEW

PLAY SERIES READING.02

I knew as soon as I started this play that the only characters would be Nancy and Victor, the husband and wife. So I put some thought into what makes a two-hander interesting. How do we keep the audience from getting bored by a repetitive back-and-forth? How do we keep them from getting ahead of the play? One way a writer can achieve that is with plot, and another way is through style. I think I try to do some of both. But I felt that there was a limit to where I could go in terms of telling the story I wanted to tell with realism.

So yeah, I do love those writers. I love Exit the King, I love The Chairs, I love Happy Days. Those are plays that I think really get at some kind of essential humanity with some great emotional depth and honesty. And Absurdism, for me, is particularly interesting when it’s grounded in something honest and painful, which is the case in Beckett and Ionesco’s work.

WHAT PREVIOUS DEVELOPMENT HAS THE PLAY HAD?I’ve had a couple chances to work on the play. In 2009, while I was in Sewanee, Tennessee on a year-long fellowship, I arranged to bring down the actors Trey Lyford and Polly Noonan and the director Susanna Gellert to workshop the play with me. Polly had subsequently expressed interest in directing the piece, and we put together a short workshop in New York City last June, with Jo Adler and Rob Campbell. More recently, in October, Polly and I had the privilege of working on the piece in Chicago with Mierka Girten and Guy Van Swearingen from A Red Orchid Theatre.

During that Chicago workshop, I furiously revised the piece, particularly the third section. I think I got pretty far, but there may be areas to keep pushing in that respect when I’m at the Playwrights’ Center in early December. Again, I want to stay ahead of the audience, but I also want to make sure they’re with me on the journey of the play. And the third part is very tricky because it is further out of the realm of the everyday. Figuring out exactly what the action of that is, what the tone of it is, is something that is great for me to work on with actors.

“I’m interested in that kind of peeling away, this idea that a play you think is one thing becomes something else.”

WHAT OTHER PROJECTS HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING ON RECENTLY?Over the summer, Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep in Providence produced my newest play, . It’s a play for one actor about success and failure,

Studio Roanoke in Roanoke, Virginia. That’s a play I’m very excited about. I’m also writing a new play in the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab right now, Loop Tape, that will have a reading there in April.

I work a lot with a jazz saxophonist, John Ellis, and we’re starting a new collaboration, our third, loosely inspired by the 1987 voyage of the Mobro 4000, New York’s infamous garbage barge to nowhere. In April 2011, we have a month-long residency at The Jazz Gallery in New York, which will culminate with a public concert of excerpts from this new piece. Also, thanks to the Playwrights’ Center and the Network of Ensemble Theatres, we have a grant to explore the physical nature of the piece with Theatre Grottesco in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So we’re going to go down there for a week in January.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE OR DISLIKE IN A PLAY?I like pieces that surprise me. There aren’t necessarily any particular criteria, but when I see a play that I really love, I know it. I’ll give you the example of Greg Moss’s Orange, Hat & Grace. Really beautiful play. Could I explain what it was that made that play compelling to me? I guess in some ways I could, but there’s also a kind of beautiful uncannyness about it, in that it wasn’t a play that said, “Okay, here’s what the rules of drama are,” though it clearly is written by someone who knows what he’s doing and knows how to build a play. It’s more like a work of art, I guess, because it’s surprising and strange and greater than the sum of its par ts. And that seems important to me.

“I like pieces that surprise me. There aren’t necessarily any particular criteria, but when I see a play that I really love, I know it.”

Casa Cushman BY Leigh Fondakowski

This ensemble play examines the life and work of 19th-century American actress Charlotte Cushman. One of the most important actresses of her time, Cushman continually

challenged Victorian notions of gender in her stage portrayals of male characters and of strong, androgynous female characters. A play about love, impermanence, beauty, and the devil’s bargains we each make along the way to have the life and the love that we want.Casa Cushman is being developed in partnership with Tectonic Theatre Project, with support from the University of Minnesota’s Imagine Fund, Institute for Advanced Study, and Department of Theatre Arts & Dance.

DECEMBER 10, 2010 at 7 PM • DECEMBER 11 at 3 PM • FREEAt the UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA • NORTHROP AUDITORIUM

Laugh With UsADAPTED BY Kira ObolenskyFROM A TRANSLATION BY Dr. Lisa Peschel

This cabaret, originally created by prisoners in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, receives a new adap-tation by Playwrights’ Center Core Writer Kira Obolensky, based on translationand research by theater historian and project dramaturg Dr. Lisa Peschel.This project is made possible in part with the support of Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council, an initiative of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation.

DECEMBER 13, 2010 at 7 PM • FREE • At the PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER

THE 2010-11 RUTH EASTON NEW PLAY SERIES:

Behind the Eye BY Carson Kreitzer

Vogue model. Surrealist muse. Combat photographer. Lee Miller lived several distinct and extraordinary lives, each of them to

the fullest. Man Ray’s lover and muse, her body—or parts of it—would become iconic of surrealism, but Paris was only one stop on a journey that would include Egypt, London, and the front lines of World War II. Behind the Eye traces the path of this extraordinary woman as she discovers the only thing she cannot be: still.FEBRUARY 7, 2011 at 7 PM • FREE • at the PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER

Visit PWCENTER.ORG for more information.

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