CHAPTER ELEVEN
Three Interviews
Lee Blessing
Marsha Norman
José Rivera
For this section of the book, I talked to three well-known playwrights who have a great deal of experience in the contemporary theater: Lee Blessing, Marsha Norman and José Rivera. Each has had many plays produced by hundreds of theaters in the United States and abroad. Lee is the author of A Walk in the Woods, among other plays, screenplays and television scripts. Marsha wrote the Pulitzer-Prize winning 'Night, Mother and won a Tony for her book and lyrics for the musical The Secret Garden. And José is a playwright whose work moves easily from the world of television and film to the theater of magic realism, including his FDG/CBS award-winning play The House of Ramon Iglesia, which was later filmed for PBS.
In these interviews, we discuss craft issues; inspiration; theatricality; personal passions; what is learned from adaptation; what is learned from other writers, directors, actors and designers; rules and rule-breaking; getting ideas; structuring and outlining; first drafts; rewriting; play development; production; rehearsal; and the joys and frustrations of collaboration. I tried to ask each writer the kinds of questions I thought you, the reader, might ask.
Lee Blessing
Lee Blessing was born in Minnesota and started writing plays in the late 1970s. He studied poetry and drama at the University of Iowa, and his earliest works were performed at such theaters as Actors Theatre of Louisville, Brass Tacks and the Cricket Theater. He is best known for his two-character play about U.S. and Soviet arms negotiators, A Walk in the Woods. A Walk in the Woods was produced by Yale Rep and La Jolla Playhouse prior to its Broadway premiere in 1988. It was nominated for both a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Since then the play has been produced dozens of times, including stagings in London (with Alec Guiness in the lead) and Moscow. It was filmed for American Playhouse with the New York cast, Robert Prosky and Sam Waterston. His other plays include Two Rooms, about a U.S. hostage held in Beirut; Cobb, about the controversial baseball star; Riches, about a battling couple; Fortinbras, a comic “sequel” to Shakespeare's Hamlet; and Patient A, based on the story of Kimberly Bergalis, the woman who died of AIDS after contracting the disease from her dentist. Blessing has won numerous grants, fellowships and awards, including an NEA, a Bush Fellowship and a McKnight Fellowship. He has been a member of both New Dramatists in New York City and The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. He has written the screenplay for the film Steal Little, Steal Big and teleplays for such series as Picket Fences. Blessing and his wife, the director Jeanne Blake, live in Los Angeles.
Jeffrey Hatcher: You grew up in Minnesota, in a suburb outside Minneapolis. Did you see a lot of plays when you were young?
Lee Blessing: The first experiences I had with drama were at high school. I was at school when the Guthrie Theater started. My family was not a theatergoing family, and I don't think I saw any shows there until the second season. The first production I ever saw was Saint Joan. So by the time I was beginning to experience any theater at all, I'd already written a play—done in a “barn,” so to speak.
Hatcher: Do you think there's a difference between writers who are able to experience plays at an early age and writers who, for whatever reason—education, the city he or she grew up in—aren't able to see plays until later in life?
Blessing: I think it might affect how quickly you develop. A kid who grows up in New York with parents who are avid theatergoers, and who's been going to see plays since he was ten, well, his abilities as a playwright might develop more quickly, and he might be writing plays in his twenties that maybe I wasn't writing until I was in my thirties. I think that's possible.
Hatcher: What's the difference between the plays you wrote in graduate school at the University of Iowa in your twenties and the ones you wrote six or seven years later?
Blessing: For me, it's been a very gradual and even progression in terms of my abilities as a writer, as I matured as a person—assuming that's occurred. So I don't think there have been big moments of change. When I was starting out writing plays, the big pitfall was that the dominant playwrights in the world, whose influences were felt in America, were mostly Europeans, like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, theater-of-the-absurd playwrights. Playwrights who had nothing to do with the American tradition of playwriting. And yet those were the writers I read first, and quite avidly. Of course, at the same time I was reading Shakespeare and Shaw and Sophocles. These things didn't tend to go terribly well together, and, again, none of them was in the rich American tradition of the previous one hundred years. So I was rather lost, I think, when I first started writing plays. I didn't quite understand how you did it. I'd read Eugene O'Neill, but again he's a rather unusual playwright. So the first thing I had to do was unlearn how to write like a theater-of-the-absurd writer because I slowly came to realize that wasn't what I had to say. It was a style that wasn't getting me anywhere.
Hatcher: Do you think a lot of writers imitate a style they're drawn toward? Even if it isn't their own?
Blessing: Constantly. I noticed it in writing poetry. The writers I enjoyed the most were those who, when I tried to imitate their style, eluded me. I ended up with terrible poetry. I'd read a Theodore Roethke poem or a James Wright poem, and try to write that way, and it didn't get me anywhere. The same thing can happen in drama. They're wonderful writers, but they're just not me.
Hatcher: At what point in your development as a writer did you become aware of the audience? Some playwrights say they never think about the audience while composing a play.
Blessing: That's really an individual concern. If they think too much about the audience, they'll become self-conscious. When I'm writing the play, I don't spend a lot of time consciously thinking about the audience. But every time I think about writing a new play, one of the questions I know I have to ask myself is does an audience care about this? Do they care about it in the same way / do? If they don't, can I get them to? Do they have a strong investment in this issue anyway? Because if they don't, it's a big climb to get them to.
Hatcher: When you get an idea for a play, do you think it tends to come from one source, or do they come from all sorts of things: an overheard line of dialogue, a place, a concern …?
Blessing: Sadly, from a lot of different sources. Otherwise I'd just go back to the same old one.
Hatcher: Is it hard to pick and choose?
Blessing: It can be. If I'm fortunate, I find something I'm excited by, and I get an idea and it stays with me. I don't ever write a play I haven't thought about for a couple of months—and often for years. This is to make sure that at least I continue to be interested. It's a lot of work to write a play, and why would you do that unless you continued to be fascinated by it?
Hatcher: When you're thinking about a play, be it a year or so, or a couple of months, is there a particular process you've come to depend on?
Blessing: It's changed. A lot of this has to do with the opportunities that have been presented to me combined with the work patterns one has. Before A Walk In the Woods, I would be writing a play, and no one would be much concerned with that fact. And I would get the play read at The Playwrights' Center, and if it went well I would rewrite the play, and if it went badly, I guess I'd rewrite the play more, and then I'd have a second reading there or at New Dramatists in New York, or something like that. And ultimately I'd try to interest theaters. From first draft to premiere, mis might take a couple of years. After A Walk in the Woods got done in 1988 there was a period of years in which I got a lot of commissions to write plays for theaters. There was a commission every year. And when someone says, “We'd like you to write a play, and we're going to do it next year,” you really only have about a year to put a play together from conception to a producible form, and that's not a great deal of time, as you know. It's enough, but barely enough. In the case of some of those plays, I'd missed that early process of getting a play read in a sit-down reading, and felt I had to go back and do a second production of the play, considerably rewritten, to feel as if I was really finished with what I wanted to do with it.
Hatcher: Is there a particular period of gestation, from conception to production?
Blessing: I'd hate to characterize it. Some plays get written very quickly. The first draft of A Walk in the Woods got written very quickly. The first draft of Patient A got written very quickly. But with Patient A, that draft came after two years of planning and research, whereas some plays have stuck with me and taken quite a while. The play I'm writing now is one I've been thinking about for a year and a half. And things get in the way as well. As my wife, the director Jeanne Blake, and I have done more television and film writing, suddenly playwriting, which doesn't pay as well and as dependably, has to find its own niche in the amount of time you can spend on it. It's always a complex sort of calculation, so in a sense I couldn't say it takes two years to write and complete a play. But generally for me it does.
Hatcher: When you get an idea for a play, what comes first: the big idea? The setting? Situation? Or do you always see a person?
Blessing: It's usually more related to people than concepts. Sometimes I'll give myself an assignment. If I' ve been writing certain sorts of things or emphasizing certain sorts of ideas in plays, I do the opposite. So after the first few plays, which were all about men, I assigned myself some plays with women. But beyond that, there was no specific assignment. They didn't have to be any particular women in any particular place with any particular dramatic problem to solve. I wrote Independence and then Eleemosynary and the assignment was: no men. Just don't write men in these plays. Later, after completing Riches, which was a husband/wife play, I decided I wanted to write something that was really more off page one, the news, a headline kind of play, a public issues kind of play since I'd never done that. I didn't know which public issue I wanted to write about, but eventually it occurred to me that it would be interesting to write about arms control. A Walk in the Woods got started that way. After that, I gave myself another assignment. From my first play through A Walk in the Woods, all of the plays I'd written had a great deal of humor in them, and used humor a lot to entertain, even in my most serious plays. So—for some odd reason—I decided to banish humor from some plays for a while and write about things I really couldn't joke about.
Hatcher: Were you conscious in choosing those subjects that by banishing humor it would be good for your writing, a good challenge? That in the challenge you would develop some different muscles?
Blessing: That was the point. The point of not writing men is to write women better. The point of not using humor is to make sure I'm not using humor as a crutch. To feel as though I can encounter a serious theme and treat it in a serious, sober manner and still make that entertaining, still make people want to watch that.
Hatcher: When you get an idea for a play, do you know where your characters are going to go? Do you start writing the play before you know the end?
Blessing: All my training taught me that you have to know the climax before you write the play, otherwise you don't know what it's going to do to the audience, and therefore you don't know why it exists. By far, the most efficient way to write a play is to know where it's going. And I still think that's true. But it's hard to do that all the time because one also has to maintain a sense of interest and wonder and excitement about the journey as one is writing. And writing takes a long time. If one is still trying to write exactly the same moment that one conceived three months earlier or six months earlier, it may feel a little stale by the time you get there. So I'm always alive to a play growing and changing as I write it. I do tend to have a plot plan when I start. It's not always the strongest feature in my mind when I think about the play. The characters will be stronger. The way they say things will be stronger. The relationships, the premise, are all more vivid to me than perhaps where it's going to go. But if I don't have a very strong clue as to an action, a climax that's going to compel me as well as an audience, then I'm not terribly confident that the play is going to work out as a good piece of writing.
Hatcher: Have you ever mapped out a play—decided where it was going to go, identified its climax—and then somewhere along the way moved away from that route and found a more interesting way to go?
Blessing: Sure. That happens. I've heard that was true of A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams had fully intended to take it one way and about half way through the writing he saw a different route that was far more interesting and took that. That certainly can happen, and so it's important to stay alive to possibilities. There are times when you realize, suddenly in the middle of writing it, that you can take the play much further, that it could be about much more than you thought it could be about. Sometimes the fruit of writing characters well is that you suddenly discover they're far more interesting people than you'd ever expected them to be.
Hatcher: Isn't there a difference, though, between a playwright who chooses a route, chooses a climax and then discovers a different route or climax, and one who starts off without a route?
Blessing: A considerable difference.
Hatcher: Is it because a decision on a climax means your writing is being pulled toward something, even though you may abandon the climax you've chosen?
Blessing: Sure. The conscious mind and the subconscious mind are both working on anything you're writing. You may have all these conscious intentions, this conscious road map for where a play's going to go, and subconsciously something else is going on.
Hatcher: Is there a way, when you're working on a script, to lean in to that subconscious? You've planned the plot, you've structured it, but now you want to look for the clues in the woods.
Blessing: For me, it goes back to my background as a poet. When I'm writing a scene, I try to stay alive to things that develop or dialogue that comes along which has a resonance with everything that has gone on, with the characters as they are developing, with the ways they've been speaking, with the linguistic possibilities they have and are still developing as the play goes on. So, in a sense, it's almost a matter of one's “ear” picking up things. And it's an “inner ear” that tells you when you come across something valuable, something that you should pick up and carry with you on your journey. And it may lead you down a different path. That's when it can become an exciting process.
Hatcher: Do you make these discoveries in character, action, dialogue, images …?
Blessing: In all those areas. And the different path I'm speaking of may be a path that ultimately gets you near the same goal you anticipated getting to in any case, but the route you may get there by could be different and richer and more surprising. Sometimes it can take you somewhere totally different too, and that may be a virtue for the work and it may not. That's when you have to go back to your fundamental reasons for writing the play and check your work against that. Have you ultimately created something that people can get a genuine emotion out of, one that they not only feel but know what to do with? And really I like that tension between what you planned to do and what you did at the moment. It's very valuable.
Hatcher: You've worked in the theater for over fifteen years, with various directors, actors, designers. What have you learned about the theater, and about your own writing, by working with collaborators?
Blessing: You learn a tremendous amount. Certainly you learn a great deal about how what you write needs to be a useful tool for somebody to take on to stage and speak in a three-dimensional medium and make real in front of other people. You can't write a line or a moment that you yourself would be embarrassed to perform, assuming you had all the talents of a good actor. So over time, by working with any set of actors or directors, you learn a certain level of respect for the medium.
Hatcher: Sometimes you hear playwrights talks about actors who've taught them about the length of a line of dialogue—this is a question, say, of breath control and how playwrights often don't realize the stamina it will take to get through an overwritten speech. You'll also hear playwrights talk about how some parts of plays are more difficult for actors to memorize than others because there's something missing in the emotional or psychological through-line, scenes that don't have a clear intent or a clear objective.
Blessing: I'm leery of things that are as technical as worrying about the length of a line and an actor's breath. When 1 used to act, I remember doing Shaw, and I remember what a challenge it was to me, a relatively untrained American actor, to be able to mouth those words, to speak those long sentences and speeches one after another. Yet, it can be done. Technically it can be achieved. And when it is, it's an extraordinary effect. But actors, having to go through the experience of putting something on a stage, have to make the event convincing. That there's a level of credibility that the writer has to have emotionally—on whatever level. The writing has to have that, or the actor can't really perform it convincingly.
Hatcher: Is that the “emotional build” actors talk about? I've heard actors say, “Well, I can get to where you want me to go in a script, but I'll have to make quite a jump. It might help if you give me dialogue that gets me between A and Z.”
Blessing: That can often be a very helpful exchange with actors. I've had actors say to me, “This is nice, I love where it's getting to, but what if something like this happened between A and Z.” And I've often worked to rewrite scripts or scenes on that basis. I've also had the direct opposite experience, of an actor being so unhelpful as to tell a director in my presence, “Well, I can only do the scene one of two ways” in order to get a change they want but which I think is wrong or unnecessary. Or they'll do the opposite, as a defense mechanism, to stop me from changing anything in the script.
Hatcher: Let's talk about theatricality. You'll hear someone talk about theatricality and you think they mean actors dressed as puppets running around on stage saying, “Look at this blanket, it's really a cloud.” But some of your plays take place in rooms that look like rooms and feel like rooms—and others take on a different kind of reality. Two Rooms is an example. Fortinbras is an example too. Could you talk a little bit about how you move from one kind of theatrical depiction to another?
Blessing: I love sets. I'm always fascinated by what set is ultimately chosen for a play or suggested to people by a script. I try not to spend a great deal of time thinking about the set when I'm writing it other than to get the most fundamental ground rules set up. In Two Rooms I wanted one room, one space. I wanted it to be empty. There were still lots of choices to be made by the set designers. Marjorie Kellogg designed the first production at the La Jolla Playhouse and did a magnificent job with minimals, you know. The choices she made were texture and color and some other choices which were just wonderful and did a tremendous amount for the play.
Hatcher: And the idea in the play, just so everybody knows, is that you're primarily in two rooms, one in the United States and one in Lebanon.
Blessing: It's his office in his Washington home which is stripped of all furniture. And the other one is the empty room where he's being held in Beirut.
Hatcher: But at any given time the characters are in the same space onstage, but we understand that they are in totally different places.
Blessing: They are in one place or the other, and then of course imaginatively the characters bleed from one place to the other.
Hatcher: Now that kind of theatrical idea is one that comes up when you're writing the play. Do you remember the first time you came up with an idea that was that theatrical—or was your very first play like that?
Blessing: Yes, it's interesting—because Two Rooms was not a play that I could have started to write without knowing that about the set. So that was a set decision that came very, very early, whereas Fortinbras—I said to myself, “I know it's in Elsinore. That much I know, but where in Elsinore, what the sets are …”—that slowly developed as I started the scenes and decided where, and then the play was sort of telling me where it wanted to go next. Some of my earlier plays were set in more realistic situations that were very specific. In Independence it started out as a play about three sisters, and it happened in one small town in Iowa, in an apartment one of them had. And then in later drafts their mother kept calling, and finally she became so important on the phone that I introduced her into the play—and, before I knew it, they were all at her house in a different Iowa town so the set shifted as the story shifted and settled in Independence, Iowa.
Hatcher: Change of topic. This is the “seductive lollipop” question. Some plays find more success than other plays, either commercially or artistically. You've spoken to me about the ingredients a playwright often puts into a play to entertain, hook, bring in an audience—seductive lollipops you called them. Then there are those plays that don't have that same kind of hook, but still attention must be paid.
Blessing: I think any actor knows that he's going to play a whole spectrum of roles in his career, and some of those are going to have an absolute magnetism for an audience. Zero Mostel played a lot of roles, but they weren't all Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. He played even more wonderful roles in other important plays. But there are some that just click, like Tevye. It's what every actor hopes for—that's the one they'll be remembered for, that's the one that will enhance their career. It's similar when you write plays. They all have value as projects. Almost all of them are intensely enjoyable to create and produce. Not all of them have whatever that magical thing is, and you can't always tell what it's going to be either. It's not always in the realm of what's humorous or appealing or sentimental or massaging or easy or melodramatic. Or seductive. Sometimes it can simply have to do with a question the society is asking itself subliminally and intensely at the time. A good play can hit for that reason. 'Night, Mother was like that. It said something to people that was important to them about life and death, about the value of living life as a woman in America today, in a country that didn't value a certain class of women or women as a class in a way it probably ought to.
Hatcher: What do you find most troubling about a play? Let's say a friend or colleague has written a play or you've written a play and you think it's dealing with a subject matter that should be dealt with—maybe it's addressing issues that other people aren't addressing, you think it's a good play. And yet it's not cooking in all the right ways. The audiences aren't flocking to see it. Do you think that some dramatists “write out of their time” and that it will take twenty years for their plays to win favor?
Blessing: I don't think a playwright can spend his or her time worrying about that. One simply has to write and do as well as one can with each project—be as ambitious as one can be as a writer with each project and try to work with the best people one can work with. I honestly think, especially from a writer's point of view, there is no way to predict or try to manipulate how a play will do with audiences in general. You can try to learn from how your earlier plays have done, but I think it only can diminish you as a writer to start making that your top priority. As for people writing for their own time or people writing ahead of their time, I'm sure it happens. We write plays because it's a challenging genre, we have a talent for it and there is on some level pleasure in producing good plays, good scripts. If audiences happen to like it as well, that's wonderful.
Hatcher: Now you're working on something new, but you don't want to talk about it because …
Blessing: Because it would be bad for me to talk about it.
Hatcher: Why do you think it's bad?
Blesssing: It tends to diminish one's energy for actually writing the piece. Every writer wants to get out of writing to begin with. That goes without saying. When you're a writer your highest priority is how to keep from writing. And so you have to guard against too many things that make it too easy not to write. One of the things that I think makes it easy not to write is to be able to go down to the coffeehouse and sit with your friends and tell them all about this great new idea you have. Once you've expressed it, you sort of have the entire pleasure of getting the feedback from the original conception, and it's very hard to bank up sufficient energy then to go to all the trouble of writing it. Writing takes a long time. It's slow going, and you need to keep the carrot out in front of you a little bit. I want to keep that carrot.
Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for her play 'Night, Mother. The play also won four Tony nominations, the Dramatists Guild's prestigious Hull-Warriner Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. A feature film, starring Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek, with a screenplay by Norman, was released in August 1986. 'Night, Mother has been translated into twenty-three languages and has been performed around the world.
Her first play, Getting Out, received the John Gassner Playwrighting Medallion, the Newsday Oppenheimer Award and a special citation from the American Theatre Critics Association. Her two one-act plays, Third and Oak: The Laundromat and The Pool Hall premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Her play The Hold-Up was workshopped at ATL as well. Traveler in the Dark premiered at American Repertory Theatre and was later staged at the Mark Taper Forum under the direction of Gordon Davidson. Sarah and Abraham premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1987 and was produced at the George Street Playhouse in the fall of 1991.
Norman received a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for her Broadway musical The Secret Garden. Her play Loving Daniel Boone had its premiere at the 1992 Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival, and her latest play, Trudy Blue, premiered in the 1995 Humana Festival. She wrote the book and lyrics for The Red Shoes, with music by Jule Styne.
Marsha Norman, Four Plays was published by Theatre Communications Group in 1988. Her first novel, The Fortune Teller, was published in 1987. Norman has worked in television and film, including most recently Face of a Stranger, starring Gena Rowlands and Tyne Daly.
Norman has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Academy and Institute of Letters. She has been play wright-in-residence at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and she has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Achievement. She serves on the Council of the Dramatists Guild, and on the boards of the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Independent Committee for Arts Policy. She is the recipient of the Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Jeffrey Hatcher: How do you recognize a play idea that lends itself to drama and theater? Is there a rule of thumb you use when you're thinking up plays and receiving ideas from the world?
Marsha Norman: I think that the pieces for the theater clearly have to be events that must be witnessed. You have to see it to believe it. This is the rule about a theatrical piece—“You Were There.” You would never believe that this thing could happen. That is, I think, a quality of a good piece for the theater. Somehow your presence as an audience is required. Pieces that have to do with great geographic scale—obviously those things are better done in films. Quite frankly, pieces that are about sort of domestic interiors that require close but not deep attention are better for television. We're in a curious place in the development of the theater where we need to think a lot about what can only be done in the theater and just do that. My new play, for example, takes place entirely in the leading character's mind. You don't know that because you are flipping around from scene to scene seeing all kinds of events and hearing people who were never in the same room together and all that kind of life of the mind on the stage. That's what I think we need to be looking for more overtly, to find the theatrical event.
Hatcher: If you were to see something in the newspaper or overhear a conversation and you started to apply certain tests to it and you thought to yourself, “Well, I'd like to write it as a play; but I can see it just as readily as a novel or a screenplay,” would you avoid it entirely as a theater piece or would you search for something theatrical about it?
Norman: When I have ideas for plays I try to dismiss them immediately so that I only end up writing the plays I have to write.
Hatcher: The ideas that insist themselves?
Norman: There are lots of unnecessary plays written. Those are the ones that cause you lots of pain. The good ones are pieces that have to be, as I say, witnessed by a group. They are communal from the beginning, and those are the things that work best in the theater. Look at a play like Brian Friel's Faith Healer, for example. The telling of it has to be in the theater. That's the way that it best moves people. Our Town would be the dopiest novel in the world, and it would make a really silly movie. Whenever there are elements of the paranormal, the extranormal, the nondomestic, those are the things that belong best in the theater.
Hatcher: In his book The Empty Space the director Peter Brook says that when he was shooting the film of King Lear, the problem was that he actually had to film the real beach where Gloucester dies, but the wonderful thing about the stage is that the blind Gloucester thinks that he is on a cliff, his son knows they're on a beach, and as far as the audience is concerned they're on a set of stage planks—you can be in three different spaces at the same time; but you can never do that in film. You've got to be specific.
Norman: Right. We actually experience our lives closer to the way that they are presented in the theater than the way they are presented in film and TV. I think people get disenchanted when their lives don't work out the way they do in film and TV, and they don't have all the correct costumes and they don't have people who say the right things, and they don't look the right way. Television has created a world full of spectators. Theater always creates a world of participants.
Hatcher: This is a quote of yours: “In the theater you're in jail for two hours, and if you don't make the audience happy they're going to be really pissed off.”
Norman: That's true. That's why I think that criticism for the theater is often so brutal, because the critics actually get mad. You kept them there for that time, and they didn't like it. They had other ideas about what to do with their evening.
Hatcher: When you're looking at an idea for a play and it's demanding to be written, how quickly does it turn into a question of character?
Norman: It's almost always a question of character. I know that other people write from different motivations, but I almost always write with a desire to understand the action of one person. Why did this person do that? In other words, I become aware of an act. If we could use 'Night, Mother for a moment, I became aware of the act of this woman who killed herself, who lived with her mother for her whole life, who suddenly said, “'Night, Mother,” went in the bedroom and killed herself. And you think, “Why did she do that? How did she do that? And why do I think it was an act of courage?” I tend to only write about acts of courage, so it's easy to answer questions about this. I see somebody doing something that I think is a really powerful move, and I know that it's not generally recognized as a powerful move. I know that it's my task as playwright to get it into the right category. I know people who would say, “Oh, well, Jessie, that's just a selfish thing to do” or “That's just a defeatist weak thing,” and I think that, no, actually in this case for this woman committing suicide was the realization of her own power over her life; and that's what she wanted to do with it. She could have at the moment made any number of decisions. At that place of power she could have decided to go to beauty school, for example; but I don't think they would have given me the Pulitzer Prize for it.
Hatcher: You've talked a lot about the need for characters to take control of their lives, just as people need to take control of their lives. Is that the primary action of a two-hour play?
Norman: It's very important to select the two hours from that person's life or the collected moments that add up to two hours from which the whole life is visible. You want to be able to see how they got into this predicament, you want to see what the predicament is, and you want to have a sense of what they're going to do and where the life will take them. Lots of time people choose the two hours too soon or two hours too late. You can easily imagine a 'Night, Mother play that's written from the viewpoint of the funeral. Jessie's in her casket and Momma and all her friends are gathered around and the play begins then and the whole thing is done in flashbacks. This would be just silly, hopelessly boring. In 'Night, Mother the way it's structured you know that she is going to kill herself, but you don't believe it. And it's your lack of belief, it's your struggle against this inevitability that somehow creates the drama—because this is the drama that everybody lives with all the time: Am I gonna make it to the end of this?
Hatcher: How much do you think about the audience before you write a play and while you're writing it?
Norman: I don't think about them too much, but I know a lot about them instinctively. I know that they have to laugh every now and then or they'll get fidgety. I know that they have to be rooting for something for that character and they have to know what it is that character wants and be able to see that that character is trying very hard to get it. The audience loses patience so fast with characters who aren't really active in their own behalf.
Hatcher: Do you think a character has to be likeable?
Norman: I don't think they have to be likeable, but I think they have to be understandable. The audience has to be able to say, “If I were that person, I would do that. If I had that history, that experience, those disabilities, that anger, that whatever-it-is, then I would do that.” It has to be comprehensible. It's like the writing of villains—you know, the better reasons they have to be villains the better villains they are.
Hatcher: Your connection to an audience is instinctive?
Norman: Yes. People who are storytellers have grown up telling stories and watching the audience, whether it was their parents or their friends in school or people on the telephone or whatever, and you know about the timing of individual lines, you know the things that make people interested. You know how to drop little hints so that the audience begins to unravel the story for itself.
Hatcher: Were you a storyteller when you were a kid?
Norman: I was, but I also grew up at the knees of a great one. My grandfather was one of the most gifted storytellers in the world. He grew up in New Mexico where there were all these great stories to be told, things about ranching and wheat-threshing crews and tangles with snakes.
Hatcher: So did you find that storytelling came naturally to you?
Norman: Absolutely. It's an instinct. I think that somehow there is this ancient occupation of the storyteller, the tribal storyteller; and these occupations—just like the other ones of shoemakers and cobblers and canners and beer-makers—are all passed down. There is a need in the community for someone to tell the stories of the tribe and tell what has gone before and preserve a sense of what it has felt like to be alive in this time. It's oral history on the hoof, as it were, and there's basic survival information in the plays that we keep around. Oedipus has been around not just because it's a great piece of writing; it's because there's something in it that everybody has to know. We write them and present them and then the culture decides whether to retain them. Obviously when a society forgets an important story, we can get into trouble.
Hatcher: When you started to attend the theater, did you observe and absorb lessons about theater craft or did you study it later?
Norman: I was a thirsty child who spotted water. I think that I knew that this was somehow the world that I belonged in. I didn't act on that for a long time because I didn't really believe it was possible. I was under the impression I was going to have to be a missionary or something; but I watched, I listened, I absorbed lots of this. I don't think there's a better way to learn about the theater than just go a lot because what you want to do for an audience as a writer is create a theatrical experience. In other words, you don't want to create a reading experience, it's not an intellectual experience, it's an experience of being in the theater and responding as a body, as a human physical body to what's going on on the stage. Your mind, your body are all one. You can't get a play just from reading it. You have to be there. So, when the idea is to create an experience for people, what you can do to learn about it and learn how to do it is to have the experience as much as possible. If you were designing roller coasters, you would go and ride all the great ones. You would listen and watch for when people screamed. You wouldn't read about them.
Hatcher: Let me jump over to the subject of rules. You like to experiment with the rules of playwriting. Which are the unbreakable ones and which are the breakable?
Norman: The unbreakable ones are no passive central character and no more than one central character. The central character has to want something that is within his or her means. I used to think that the Aristotelian notion of time was an unbreakable rule, but I no longer believe that. I do think that the action has to be circling around one issue and be driven by the needs of one character. The reason audiences respond better to one protagonist is because this is how we experience our own lives. We have a collection of issues, and we deal with them one at a time. We all feel that we are the center of our own story.
Hatcher: Aside from the question of breaking time frames, what other rules do you like to play with onstage? You've experimented with time travel and multiple story frames in Loving Daniel Boone and Sarah and Abraham, for example.
Norman: What I like best to play with is the notion that the visible and the invisible are quite close and in fact they are both sensible and active realms in which we play. That the invisible is woven around and through the visible in our daily lives. By the invisible I mean there are people from the past, people who are dead, people who never existed, people we dreamed of, ideas that we had, dreams, hopes, fears, those things all might as well be characters that are walking around on a stage. My own fear of heights, for example, in certain circumstances could very well be dressed up with me and screeching at me the whole time. Our minds operate in a world where fears become personified. On the other hand, people transform into other shapes. I'm sure that my mother in my mind is actually seventy to eighty feet tall and very loud and very powerful, in spite of the fact that she is a sixty-four-year-old woman who died five years ago. In the theater we can present things as they seem, not as they are. In Trudy Blue, for example, when I have people who are fantasy figures walking around in between conversations that are actually happening, this is how it is. This is actually what happens. Our world is populated by the people that we dream about and that we fear and not just the ones that we could actually go pinch.
Hatcher: In the battle between those theater artists who say theater should be linear and those who say, “Well, life is nonlinear and hence why should theater be linear?”—is it fair to say that you play with some nonlinear ideas while holding onto Aristotelian structure?
Norman: So far I do, but I may be breaking out of that. I think that our ability to perceive story is all changing rapidly with the amount of television that we watch and the effects of the computer world. Those things really do change the way people think. For a very long time people pretty much thought in the same ways. They remembered stories in the same ways and they presented them in the same way—the Charles Dickens version. This is how stories were presented more or less from the beginning of time. There's not a lot of difference between Tale of Two Cities and Sodom and Gomorrah. It's kind of the same story.
Hatcher: Jon Jory, the artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville, said that one of the attributes that told him you were going to be a terrific writer was your ability to rewrite. When you go into a first draft, how conscious are you of how you're going to be progressing as each draft comes? Do you say to yourself, “Well, I know I can't do such-and-such in this draft because I'll be able to get back to this problem in about two months”?
Norman: All that I know in terms of a first draft is that it's more important to get it down than it is to get it right, you know? You have to get the hundred pages filled up first. This is the thing that most people never do. Most plays never get finished. That does not mean you just force yourself to fill a hundred pages. My view of it is you wait until you can fill the hundred pages before you start to write. You feel this gathering force within you. When it reaches this critical point and you know that you've got enough to fill the hundred pages, then you start and you write it. You just get it down, and you don't let yourself labor over individual sentences, individual scenes. You get things good enough so that you can go forward. The trick about that first draft is to get your excitement onto the page, this sort of need, this urgency, this “Listen, I have to tell you this. You are not gonna believe this.”
Hatcher: We're all supposed to learn from our mistakes. Were there any plays that you have written and said of later “Well, I guess that wasn't that necessary” or “Maybe I shouldn't have been writing that scene that day”?
Norman: I feel like I've made almost all the mistakes. I haven't made the mistake of quitting entirely, and this is what saved me. I've continued to do this. I think that obviously there are plays I made mistakes with. Circus Valentine was a play about too many people. The Hold-Up was a play that had characters that didn't belong together naturally. Those are characters that I put together, and the audience somehow knew that these are not people who would naturally appear in the same scene. There have been lots of times when the content of something has been at war with the form of it. In fact, this is one of the things I believe most strongly about the theater—that you have a chance for a great piece of work when the form and the content meet and lock instantly. You can't just put content in any kind of form. If you have marbles you can't put them in a black felt bag.
Hatcher: As an example of form meeting content, 'Night, Mother could never have been written with an intermission. You could never have written that play out of its natural sequence because you would have lost the compression of time and the compression of ideas and the urgency and ferocity of the debate.
Norman: Right. In 'Night, Mother, I got away with writing an argument; by that I mean a philosophical argument. To live or not—to be or not to be. This is the question of 'Night, Mother. It's great that by shutting down everything else and creating the sense of urgency in the debate I allow people to listen to what's being said and follow it as though it were action. It's not physical action, but it feels like it is because there's threatened action at every moment.
Hatcher: What's exciting about the younger writers you work with today?
Norman: I do think that writing plays is primarily a thing for young people to do. There is a kind of inherent struggle in the form that is echoed by the struggle in the lives of young people to say, “Here's who I am, here's what I'm gonna do, and watch out. Here are the things that scare me, here are the things that seem unfair.” It's almost a kind of petulance of form. “I insist on telling you this. I'm gonna interrupt your life to tell you this.” Later on in people's lives they become less demanding or they realize, “Well, hey, you know, if you want to look at this in a couple of days, fine.” What thrills me about working with young writers is the fact that youth is exactly when those real thematic, dramatic issues of a career are being established. As for writing about old age, Shakespeare was the only guy that could actually write plays about the sunset years. Nobody since then has really been able to do that. Older playwrights try, and obviously some writers have written some nice things, but that striving of youth is very exciting, and somehow it seems to be central to our survival as a species.
Hatcher: Imagine you're working with a young writer who seems to be a very theatrical writer yet is more attuned to computer-age, MTV kind of thinking—very fast, very nonlinear. You think the writing is really sizzling, but there's something about the plays that doesn't work. Maybe it's the structure. Maybe the drama isn't as conflict-oriented as it could be. Would you suggest to that playwright that she should try to write something in strict tried-and-true Aristotelian structure, or would you let that writer just keep going and discover the right way for herself?
Norman: I think writing exercises are great. You need to have as much flexibility and power and skill and craft as you can gather up because you never know what's going to be needed by any one project. There are people who belong in film and TV and don't have that kind of sense of urgency and presence that you need to work in the theater. There's a great sentence that Lillian Hellman has in this introduction to Chekhov's letters, and she says playwrights all have this killer instinct. I think this is true. There is something about the end of Hamlet—everybody ends up dead. Movies aren't like this. Nor is television. But there are some times when you lose really big in life, and this is part of what the theater is willing to show. There are just some situations that end up killing everybody. I think that there's something about that kind of boldness, that sort of risk-taking that is natural to theatrical writers. The real people that belong in the theater know that, just know it. I'm sure that it's the same with great trapeze artists; there is probably some great thing that you have to know in your blood if you're gonna be a great trapeze star. Playwriting is a physical craft, and it's a thing that requires muscle, intellectual and emotional. People who are afraid of that, people who are afraid of doing damage—those are the people who'll never make it. You have to be willing to be a killer.
José Rivera
José Rivera was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His play The House of Ramon Iglesia, winner of the 1983 FDG/CBS New Play Contest, aired on the public television series American Playhouse. The Promise premiered at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and was recently seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, London. Each Day Dies With Sleep premiered at Circle Repertory Theatre, was seen at the national theater of Norway, and at the Orange Tree Theatre. The Los Angeles production of Each Day Dies With Sleep received six Drama-Logue Awards, including Best Play. Marisol premiered at the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. The La Jolla production of Marisol received six Drama-Logue Awards, and the Joseph Papp Public Theatre production received a 1993 Obie Award for Outstanding Play. Giants Have Us in Their Books: Six Naive Plays premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Cloud Tectonics was part of the 1995 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and is scheduled at the La Jolla Playhouse and the Goodman Theatre, Chicago. Honors include grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 1989 Rivera studied screen writing with Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez at the Sundance Institute. In 1990 he was writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre, London, while on a Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Playwriting. In 1992 he received the prestigious Whiting Foundation Writing Award. Film and television credits include the critically acclaimed NBC series Eerie, Indiana (co-creator and producer), P.O.W.E.R.: The Eddie Matos Story (ACE Award nomination) for HBO, and the screenplay Lucky for Interscope Films. Rivera is married to writer Heather Dundas; they have two children, Adena Maritza and Teo Douglas.
Jeffrey Hatcher: You're a playwright who also does a lot of work in television and film—you've written screenplays, produced a television show (Eerie, Indiana), but you keep coming back to the theater. Why?
José Rivera: It's hard to leave a first love behind. Here is something I fell in love with early, very early in life, and even before I knew I wanted to be a writer I knew there was something about the theater that I loved. It's hard to let that go. I like the idea of dedicating my life to something like this. I think in more practical terms I find the opportunities for personal self-expression are far greater in the theater than in movies and television. I feel theater is the most personal of the media, then film, and then television. I also find that I need to tell stories in imagery. I consider myself an imagist, and I find that when I write through images, theater is the natural form for that type of expression, much more so than film.
Hatcher: When you talk about imagery, do you mean in terms of imagery within language or stage visual imagery?
Rivera: Somewhat visually, mostly within language, mostly in terms of how we express the inexpressible, how we can take the English language—its vernacular—and mold it in such a way that it expresses the things that we normally leave unexpressed. To me that is what the theater can do that the other art forms can't do and that I find missing in those other art forms when I do practice them. I find that certain stories need to be told in pictures, and when those stories urge themselves on me I write them as film. Certain stories are told through language, and those are the stories that I devote to the theater. In discussing Cloud Tectonics for a second, I knew that in discussing the nature of time and the definition of “relationships” and what “love” is that I needed all the verbal dexterity I could possibly muster—and I didn't think I could do that in pictures. Also, the theater allows a playwright a level of artistic control unheard of in the other two forms. A writer in television, once he's risen through the ranks and becomes a writer-producer, exercises an enormous amount of creative and financial control over the work; but that's rare. Most TV shows have a show runner and a staff, between six and fifteen writers; but only one person gets to run the show and call the shots—and of course, as we know, film is the director's art form. But in the theater the playwright still has enormous power to shape the outcome from casting to design; and I have tended to work with directors who are extremely comfortable with my power and do not feel, in terms of ego or territoriality, that I am a threat. You know, working for instance with Tina Landau, the director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville premiere of Cloud Tectonics, is that kind of experience. So those are the things that keep me coming back to the theater. What's kept the force going the other direction has never really been TV and film as a seduction. The disappointments that happen in a playwriting career are the things that actually have threatened me and have pushed me away. The times when I have thought to myself, “I am never going to do this again; this is just crazy,” it's because the theater itself has disappointed me, not because TV and film has been so attractive and seductive, as I said. The times when I have sweated blood for a production that has fallen short or has been mauled by the critics or for some reason the actors didn't connect with the material—when the theater itself has hurt me, that's when I've wanted to leave this. But those things have been rare and not enough to push me away permanently.
Hatcher: Let me ask you specifically about Cloud Tectonics. You said the play is about time and love, and certainly in theatrical language you can focus on the imagery of time—the play is filled with time references—but the discussion of time is also in the very nature of the theatrical performance. In fact, the conventions of the theater will often admit that time is compressed or time elongates onstage. Audiences are quite used to the idea that something that should take many weeks takes two hours on stage or something that should take ten seconds has been elongated to four minutes. I think we have an inner appreciation of that even if we don't think about it while we're watching a play. Cloud Tectonics is very much about this idea. So when you have an idea for a play like this one, (a) where does it come from, and (b) how do you then develop it into a play?
Rivera: Everything that I write comes from some kind of image, either something that I see or something I've heard or even just imagined or dreamed. Cloud Tectonics came from an airplane flight that I took. Plate tectonics is the study of the continental plates under the earth and their movements. When you study earthquakes, for instance, you study plate tectonics. So I was on a plane and I was looking out the window. I was trying to imagine if you had to define what “love” was or “sexuality”—how would you do it? I was really stuck. I couldn't figure out a good definition, and I realized that trying to do that is very similar to trying to understand the structure of clouds. As I was looking at the clouds going by, I kept trying to ask myself: How do you describe that structure, how do you describe that shape and those myriad shapes and those ever-changing shapes? And I realized you couldn't do it, but if you tried to and created a science to do that you would call it “cloud tectonics,” which is essentially a nonsense phrase because the clouds don't move like the plates. But I like the idea that even the title itself is somewhat meaningless, because grasping the idea of cloud tectonics makes as much sense as trying to grasp a definition for “love.”
Hatcher: “Cloud” sounds amorphous and billowy and “tectonics” sounds like something scientific and mechanical.
Rivera: It is the juxtaposition of two contradictory images which is the definition of surrealism. Like Magritte. Just about every one of my plays begins with that kind of imagery or that type of imagery tied to some deep emotional experience. The imagery of homeless people in New York, for instance, became critically personal once I found out that an uncle of mine had died homeless in San Diego. And that was enough to make a play out of. I get images from things I overhear, things my children say to me. There are many, many sources. And what I tend to do is gather these images. I collect them, even to the point of keeping them in a diary, and these things stay with me and I let them simmer, I let them stew for years at a time. Certain images in certain plays took many years to cook after the initial image came to me. And I tend not to be an impulsive writer. If I get an idea I don't go rushing off to write it. I had an image not too long ago of a dinner between two people who had multiple personalities. One character had three and the other character had thirteen, and if those two people had dinner what would happen? What personalities would come out and on what cues and what relationships would they have? That image came to me about a year and a half, two years ago; it stayed with me and I keep thinking about it constantly. I obsess about it, and it's that kind of thing that will stay in me until eventually the obsession grows to such a point that it demands to be written. It demands my time and I will then sit down and write the play. Once I've done the writing it goes quickly. It may take me three or four months to write a reasonable first draft—and then from that point on, as you know from your work, it becomes a process of refining and getting feedback, and that kind of thing. But the initial impulses are always images.
Hatcher: In Cloud Tectonics, although the subject, the themes and ideas may be time and love, the story and the action involve a man, a baggage handler at the Los Angeles airport who picks up a pregnant woman during a torrential rainstorm, the storm of the century, and takes her home ostensibly for one evening. During the course of the play, during the course of their relationship, we realize indeed two years have passed in one evening. Your idea for a play about time and love could have gone in a thousand different directions. What made you choose this particular story to discuss these images and ideas? What brings the idea and the story together?
Rivera: That's a very good question. When I was going about my work of gathering imagery, one of the other images that stuck with me came the day I was driving through Los Angeles, and I passed a pregnant hitchhiker on the road who was soaking wet. She was there with her thumb out, and there was fast traffic. I didn't stop, I just kept on going, and I kept wondering what happened to her, what got her to that point. I kept asking myself the dramatic question, What would have happened if I had stopped? So what happens to me is that I will—just in the course of living and having experiences—gather fragments of unrelated images. And at any one time I could be thinking of a dozen, two dozen things or subliminally carrying them around or having them in my dreams or whatever—or my notebook. And they will form a pattern. Sometimes images find each other and they form a pattern. They belong together. Compatible images are like magnets, and when enough of those images come together and the pattern becomes vivid enough, then the play takes shape. Once I was able to put together the image of my uncle dying on the street, a conversation I overheard about a woman who'd seen an angel, my experiences living in the Bronx when I was attacked by a man with a golf club, the news stories about homeless people being set on fire in New York—once all these things came together, by some natural, mental, creative process found each other and agreed, then I had the play, Marisol. And there might have been fifty other images I had floating around that didn't agree, so they just disappeared. So these things created a pattern, and that pattern becomes the play. It's a very subconscious process. Later, it becomes a more conscious process, a more writerly process of putting pen to paper and crafting the imagery in such a way that it does agree on the stage, that they're compatible and they build on each other and that an image described in the first five minutes of the play pays off in the last five minutes. That process becomes more conscious and active.
Hatcher: In Cloud Tectonics one of the major scenes is when the woman asks the man to massage her toes, her feet, and the audience senses—and you can feel this in the house—that this may lead to other things, as well it does. At the very end of the play after many years have passed and the man is now very old and on his deathbed, the woman returns, but the woman hasn't aged a day. She returns to him and she asks him if there is anything she can do before she leaves, and he says, “Well, you could massage my feet.” You can feel the excitement and the titter and the giggle go through the audience again. That is, I would think, one of those conscious arrangements of actions on the part of the playwright.
Rivera: Yes, that was very conscious on my part. I think the art of playwriting isn't some kind of mystical connection with a muse; the nuts and bolts of playwriting demand strict attention to craft. Good writers or lucky writers have access to imagery and to ideas and to voices, but the active part of the brain has to be engaged in a craftsman-like alignment of imagery and ideas and actions in order to make the play work, because it wouldn't work if things dangled. People talk about my plays in terms of magic realism. The fact is that the architecture of these plays is very, very strict—very, very thought out and preplanned. Those massage scenes illustrate a perfect example. Sometimes things take me by surprise. I will get to a certain point and something will happen and something prior in the writing will come back, simply insist itself and it'll be right. And the good writer takes advantage of that, listens to those happy accidents. Neil Simon talks about that in one of his books, about the “lucky accidents” that have happened in his work, and he is smart enough to leave those things in the play.
Hatcher: There's the old story of the screenwriters of Casablanca driving around Hollywood trying to figure out the ending to the movie, and suddenly one of them looks at the other and says a line spoken earlier in the film, “Round up the usual suspects.” And they've got their ending.
Rivera: You have to be awake to those possibilities.
Hatcher: Do you think writers leave clues for themselves in plays, especially in a first draft or second draft?
Rivera: I think writers leave opportunities. Good writers leave enough open-ended, unresolved, unfinished material in first drafts that can be somehow tied up later on or paid off in some way. There is a danger of doing that too far and then the play seems contrived, but it's like a biofeedback mechanism where ideas create new ideas which create new ideas which create new ideas. I think that good writers are always in tune with that.
Hatcher: Do you always know how a play is going to end before you start it?
Rivera: Yes, I have a good idea where I want it to go. Before I write the first draft I have the structure more or less decided. It's very important for me to find closure, to find where the parentheses end. I don't begin a project until I know where it ends. Until I know, I'm not going to commit myself to the act of writing because I can't write in an open-ended way. It just won't work for me.
Hatcher: When you get into trouble in a draft of a play, even one that eventually turns out to be very successful, do you know what things pulled you toward the trouble spots? And do you know how to get yourself out of them?
Rivera: I know from long experience that I have certain bad habits. I have a tendency toward long-windedness and repetition. So when I do get into trouble, it's usually because I've fallen into one of my own bad habits, one of my own traps. I'm now a fairly good editor of my work. I have a theory about writer's block. This will answer your question in an oblique way. I think writer's block is the best thing that ever happened to writers. I think it's nature's way of insuring that fewer bad books are written and fewer bad plays are written—because I find that when I'm blocked, I'm blocked not because I have a lack of ideas. It's because I have told a lie somewhere in the process. I have laid out a premise, I have set something in motion, I have created a character motion or something that is basically not true—either not true to the work or not true to real life—and that when I have a block I know that I'm lying about something, that I must go back and sniff it out. And once I've destroyed that premise, then the block disappears and the writing continues.
Hatcher: Can it destroy an entire play?
Rivera: I think it could. If I had gotten to some point in writing Cloud Tectonics that reached a logical impossibility—because when you deal with time you're so vulnerable to that—if I had reached that point I would have said, “I don't have a play here. I have something that is just not true. No matter how clever or interesting it is, somehow it's just not going to ring true.” I took a workshop with Gabriel García Márquez, and he said to us seven writers, “You know, when you create a work of fiction that is fantastical, you get to lie once. That's your premise, and you're granted that.”
Hatcher: The lie is the premise?
Rivera: Yes, whatever it is—like in this case that there is a woman who lives outside the field of time. That's obviously not true. It's never happened, never will happen; but that is the premise of this play. So you're granted that premise by the willing suspension of disbelief.
Hatcher: But it would be unfair, for example, if she also turned out to be a witch.
Rivera: Exactly—or a mermaid. García Márquez would say, “Okay, this premise is the fundamental lie that you are allowed to tell in order to get at the truth or a deeper truth elsewhere.” But from that point on everything must be consistent with that particular change in the physics of life. I have changed the basic physics of these particular people's lives, so everything must conform to those new rules. And part of the fun and difficulty of writing is, What are those rules? What is the world that you're making up? Because to me what's most exciting about playwriting as opposed to writing a novel is that you get to create the entire world. You get to create the color of the furniture and the smell in the room and the clothing they wear, and then you get to see it! But all those elements must be true to your original premise: What is that world, how do you define that world. In Marisol the premise is that a guardian angel leaves the person she's guarding, and that's a big leap of faith; but it's something that a good smart theatergoer would accept. Everything must follow from that. So when I get stuck, when I'm in trouble, I know it's because I violated that initial rule.
Hatcher: I wanted to ask you about some of the playwriting rules you do adhere to and the rules you like to break. I suppose one rule might be: Always keep the characters moving forward. Always keep track of what they want. Are there times when you say, “All right, I know the play's got to have the basic A-B-C's, but I certainly want to subvert D this time”?
Rivera: It's hard to answer that question because I know the playwriting rules by instinct, but I don't know if I'd even be able to express what they are. I know that somehow the action must move forward and I know that the language must not obscure the ideas of the play but underline them. The rules I tend to break deal with how we experience reality, what the logic of reality is. I tend to be very free with that logic. Like in my play The Promise, the dead can come back to life. It's not unheard of that corn can bleed, for instance, which is the end of that play. I tend to break rules that way by adding elements to what we normally call reality and experience that are completely unreal, completely works of the imagination. But I don't care. They're going to be part of the reality that I represent. Those are the rules I tend to break. I don't write like a documentarian, writing life as it is, but really life as it can be imagined. Not even life as it ought to be. Because in many of the works that I've done which are works of the imagination, the worlds are pretty bleak and difficult and dire. So it's not like I'm writing an idealized world. But I am writing worlds that can be imagined—as if there were a blurring between what happens in dreams and what happens in life. Worlds in which juxtapositions are slightly more daring than they would be in a conventional play. So those are the rules that I tend to deal with. In some ways I think actually I'm a very conventional writer because my plays have a beginning, a middle and an end most of the time. And I believe in the integrity of characters. I don't write like Sam Shepard, for instance, who creates fragments of characters or has a character basically decompose into two or three different parts. I've never done anything like that. What I do is break the rules of reality and then put that “broken” reality in the theater in a conventional form. I don't break those conventions. And even when I play with conventions, like breaking the fourth wall, I break them in a conventional way. I do it the way it's been done many times. Other kinds of rule-breaking—no plot, for example—I've never really attempted. It seems very postmodern to me. What I tend to do is to leave the larger architecture of theater more or less accessible to people and then within that to challenge their perceptions. For instance, in my play Each Day Dies With Sleep there is a young couple, just married. They're very hot for each other, they're very in love, and that is symbolized by an orange tree which they have in the house. And the orange juice itself is an aphrodisiac, and every time they want to sleep together they cut open an orange and smear orange juice on each other. Which is unconventional. I mean, it's just not something that happens in real life. The audience goes with it and says, “Oh, this is very strange.” And then what I tend to do is take that thing which is already slightly beyond the rules of the game of life and the next step. For instance, in this case the next step is that when the marriage becomes difficult and bad, those oranges turn black and the juice inside the oranges turns to gasoline, and the main character uses that gasoline to burn his house down. So it's taking something slightly unconventional and pushing it to its complete logical extreme—that the orange juice turns to gas—and, then, taking it even a step further, using that in the plot and saying that's how he burns his house down.
Hatcher: But even that is organic.
Rivera: Absolutely. That's completely organic.
Hatcher: But if the orange turns into a banana which then becomes a revolver or something? That's not organic.
Rivera: Exactly, and that kind of organic changing of the rules to me is the realism of magic realism. In Cloud Tectonics “magic” (this woman who's outside of time) and “realism” (the guy who is the baggage handler) are equal, they're married. They're a pair, and it's the juxtaposition of those two things that makes the play.
Hatcher: I'm going to leap to another subject. Many beginning playwrights struggle with dialogue. Can good dialogue writing be taught? I think structure can be taught, if it's not instinctual, and I think you can learn about character and action and how to move a play forward. But can you learn how to write good dialogue?
Rivera: The bad news is I would have to weigh in on the side of those who say no. When you read a lot of new plays, you can recognize the author who clearly knows how to write dialogue. That's the play that jumps out at you. And it may be a horrible play in lots of other ways, but you know instinctively this person has “it.” They have that gift. I think there is this intangible thing called talent and this intangible thing called inspiration. You can develop certain habits. You can develop skills. You can make a mediocre writer into a good writer that way and a good writer into a better writer. But I don't think you can teach the art of dialogue. The art of listening, which I think is absolutely the most important aspect of playwriting, the art of an open ear, an active ear is something I don't believe you can teach. You can teach eavesdropping, and I think you can teach people to go into the street, listen to what people are saying and write everything they've heard. But that's not theater. Theater is not a tape recorder; theater is a poetic reinterpretation of the tape recorder.