The publication of this odd volume, which collects three full-length plays of mine that were not written consecutively and then arranges them in reverse chronological order,* gives me an opportunity to reach back with thanks all the way to the beginning of my professional career, and beyond.
Outrage began as my actual senior thesis in college under the guidance of my adviser John Rogers, who was the first and for that matter the only person to suggest that I turn an essay on Socrates, Menocchio, and Brecht, and the relationship between martyrdom and theater, into a play in its own right, for which terribly misguided suggestion I am forever in his debt. He and my other essay adviser, David Quint—who were thankfully nothing like either of the essay advisers depicted in the play—along with various other mentors and friends, in and out of school, introduced me to the many philosophers, martyrs, and madmen who populate the world of the play, especially Norma Thompson, Owen McLeod, Gordon Farrell, and Tess Taylor,† who led me to Walter Benjamin, the final piece of the puzzle. My father, Gavriel Moses, provided additional indispensable insight into the world of academia.
Michelle Tattenbaum directed the very first reading of Outrage. This reading was attended by Emily Morse, then working, in part, as a literary scout in New York for Portland Center Stage in Oregon. Emily sent the play to Chris Coleman, the artistic director of Portland Center Stage, who went on to invite the play to his theater’s development workshop, JAW/West, and then to produce and direct its world premiere. Chris, along with Rose Riordan and Mead Hunter and the rest of the staff, gave me my first true professional artistic home, before almost anybody else was even paying attention. (Almost anybody else: a non-Equity production of an earlier version of the play at the Bloomington Playwrights Project in Indiana, directed by Rick Fonte under the artistic direction of Richard Ford and with an extremely game cast, helped very much to shape it, as did a workshop with Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project.) It was then Doug Wright who, in addition to providing his own helpful notes on the play, first introduced it to Blanka Zizka and Jiri Zizka at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where Jiri then directed the play’s East Coast premiere, further refining it. Both the Portland and the Philadelphia productions of Outrage were blessed with delightful casts whose work significantly improved the script. Those casts were also very large, and so I will let the production credits pages stand as a testament to their collective contribution, which was truly massive.
Celebrity Row began when I read the unbelievable facts at its heart: the existence of ADX Florence, the truth about who was housed there, and in what proximity to one another. It is my recollection that I read this in a Newsweek article about the delay of Timothy McVeigh’s execution, but I have since then been unable to track down the article in question. In any case, I am indebted to the author of that article, and to the many other authors whose books and articles provided me with useful background and, in some cases, foreground information about the prison and the men inside it, including, but probably not limited to, American Terrorist by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck; The New Jackals by Simon Reeve; Harvard and the Unabomber by Alston Chase; My Bloody Life and Once a King, Always a King by Reymundo Sanchez; and Afghanistan—the Bear Trap by Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin. Ian Ellwood, who has been explaining math to me since the eighth grade, explained Kaczynski’s work on boundary functions well enough for me to make use of it. Martin Epstein of the Graduate Dramatic Writing Program at NYU encouraged my early experiments with the play. The city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where I was living for a summer when I began the play in earnest, inevitably became a character in its own right, and I am grateful to those lovely environs and to all the people I met there. It was then Chris Coleman who, exhibiting the only truly meaningful kind of commitment there is, which is to say “ongoing,” first developed and produced and directed the play at Portland Center Stage.* With lessons learned from that production, the play was then radically overhauled, with developmental support from Oskar Eustis at the Public Theater and from Jim Nicola and Linda Chapman at New York Theatre Workshop, and with the help of the many terrific actors and directors who contributed their time and energy to the several readings and workshops at both those theaters, and also from Jillian Cutler, who spent an hour on the phone with me explaining how someone might fail at suing the federal government on behalf of prison inmates and then mailed me a book that explained in English what she had been trying to tell me on the phone. PJ Paperelli then produced the play in its new form at the American Theater Company in Chicago, where David Cromer, an all-around theater animal, directed it with a ruthless precision and intelligence. And both the Portland and the Chicago productions of Celebrity Row benefited from the questions, insights, and inspiration of their stellar ensembles.
Back Back Back began when I watched the first round of congressional hearings about steroids in baseball, a subject that I knew immediately I wanted to explore, and also one I knew I didn’t know enough about. My due diligence in this case included, but again was likely not limited to, Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams; Juicing the Game by Howard Bryant; and, of course, Juiced by Jose Canseco. I wrote the play’s first draft as a commission for Lisa Timmel and Tim Sanford at Playwrights Horizons, and it was then developed by Andrew Polk at the Cape Cod Theatre Project in a terrific workshop directed by Pam Mackinnon and starring Darren Pettie, Joaquin Torres, and Justin Hagan (“Yippie-yie-no-wi-fi…”). Darko Tresnjak, Lou Spisto, and the Old Globe Theater in San Diego gave the play its first full production, under the direction of Davis McCallum, a director as talented as he is tall, and starring Brendan Griffin, Joaquin Perez-Campbell, and Nick Mills, who are also as talented as Davis McCallum is tall. Lynne Meadow, Daniel Sullivan, Barry Grove, Mandy Greenfield, Lisa McNulty, and everyone at the Manhattan Theater Club gave the play a home in New York, in a production directed by Daniel Aukin, whom I’m lucky to have as a collaborator and proud to call a friend, and in which Jeremy Davidson, James Martinez, and Michael Mosley are, even as I type out these acknowledgments, still giving eight electrifying performances a week. And the great Jerry Patch, who brings new meaning to the word “champion,”* somehow managed to be involved in shepherding the play through those West and East Coast premieres both.
Thanks are also due—finally, overall, and throughout—to Mark Subias, my agent, the best advocate a playwright could hope for, and to Denise Oswald, my editor on what I hope is not our final collaboration, for at long last giving me a book big enough to rest my head on and to hit people with.
It is both a cliché and the truth that writing something like this invariably involves accidentally leaving out some deserving names, or at least including them only implicitly via compression.* And so, if you flipped directly to these acknowledgments to see whether or not I had done this to you and discovered to your total lack of surprise that I had, comfort yourself with the knowledge that not only do I regret it already but that, even worse, I also probably left in several undeserving names, which I will likely regret even more, and for much longer.†
ITAMAR MOSES
Brooklyn, New York
December 2008
* In other words, in order to shelve my work properly, please place this book upside down after first inserting into it a copy of the Faber and Faber edition of Bach at Leipzig at page 169 and of The Four of Us at page 79.
† These are examples of friends and mentors, not of martyrs and madmen.
* The reasons for my having dedicated this book to Chris are now perhaps becoming somewhat clearer.
* I don’t have a witticism here but I feel like I should.
* As in “many terrific actors.” Or: “Portland and Chicago.” Or: “Jesse J. Perez.”
† Oh, and thank you, Nick Frankfurt, for suggesting that I assuage my guilt by including the paragraph to which this footnote is appended. Good idea.