BETWEEN THE LINES – LEGACY: A weekly look at the creative process through a literary lens.

THINKING ABOUT LEGACY
Between rehearsals for the world premiere of LEGACY, WTF’s playwright-in-residence Max Posner caught up with playwright Daniel Goldfarb and director Oliver Butler to chat about wisdom received from mentors, the writing process, the future of Jewish identity, and collaboration on new plays.

[MAX POSNER] One of the great things about working in theatre is the mentorship, collaboration, and contact between different generations of artists. Whose legacies do you two carry with you as theatre artists?

[OLIVER BUTLER] My mother is an actor. As a young child, I came up to Williamstown. I was an apprentice here. I decided to become a director here. At different points in my development, I’ve stopped in. Jessica Hecht looked after me as a kid, she was someone I looked up to. I’ve only assisted a few directors in my life, but Jo Bonney [Eric Bogosian’s wife] was one of my few. She was an amazing guide for how to be in the rehearsal room. I have her as a model, and now I’m working with her husband.

[MP] What about you, Daniel?

[DANIEL GOLDFARB] Like you, I studied playwriting with Marsha Norman and Chris Durang at Juilliard. I also studied with Tony Kushner at NYU. I was Alfred Uhry’s assistant when I got out of school. And Bill Finn’s assistant, and Douglas Carter Beane’s assistant. I’ve carried what I learned from them not only artistically, but also in terms of what it means to be part of a community. Marsha and Chris empower their students, they believe in them, they believe in their voices. It was through Juilliard that I learned I could say “I’m a writer,” not “I’m a student.” That’s half the battle.

[MP] Totally.

[DG] And I try to do that with my students at NYU. You can help your students tap into who they are, and give them the confidence that what they have to say is worth listening to. Almost more than a play’s individual success, a body of work and a career is about becoming part of a community, and I try to explain that to my students. I didn’t understand that going in, I thought you could just be a writer and write at your computer and that it was solitary, but it’s not. I think those were great lessons.

[MP] When did you begin writing the play, and what came first in the writing process?

[DG] I started writing the play about three years ago. I had an idea in grad school to write a modern day retelling of the sacrifice of Isaac, set in New York, in the present, where no one was commanding anyone to do anything. I also had this idea of the Abraham character being an iconic Jewish American novelist. I started it but I wasn’t actually ready, the behavior wasn’t believable, so I put it down. Then, there was a New York Times Magazine article on reducing to a singleton from twins as the most controversial medical procedure in America today. Then, I thought, oh my god! This is how I can write this play that I never figured out how to write. This is what’s happening in the culture right now. It is biblical, in a way, and also totally modern.

[MP] And, in the process refining the play, what were the turning points?

[DG] I wrote the first 40 pages and then got stuck. I brought it into my writers’ group. They were really encouraging. I was telling them I was stuck, because it’s based on the sacrifice of Isaac from the Bible, and blah blah blah. Beau Willimon said, “I didn’t get that at all from the play. I was just invested in these characters. Let go of that, let the characters go where they want to go,” and that gave me permission. By the time people started reading it, people were investing in Neil and Suzanne and Heart. And it felt like a contemporary American story and not a parable.

[MP] Can you talk about the developmental process of the play with Williamstown?

[DG] Mandy’s been a great champion of the play and has been involved with it since inception. When she became Artistic Director of Williamstown, she called about developing the play further. She introduced me to Oliver. I had never met Oliver, even though I had been a big fan of his work. We had a terrific conversation where I felt like he understood the humor in the play, the dread in the play. The Debate Society [Oliver’s theatre company], they’re like the Masters of Dread.

[OB] I would love “Master of Dread” to follow me around.

[MP] Oliver, you’re no stranger to developing plays. You’re always nurturing new work with your company, The Debate Society. How is working on a project like Legacy similar or different to building a play with your company?

[OB] I always want to talk about how different the process is, but the truth is, it actually seems similar. You’re in a room full of people trying to tell a story and understand characters more deeply. What’s different is when I got involved in this process. There’s a huge period of catch up for me. I need to see things or hear things to understand whether they work or not. The more deeply I understand them, the more useful I am to the writer.

[MP] Daniel, do you find that most of your work evolves in a similar fashion, or do you feel the process is wildly different for each play?

[DG] The process is wildly different for each play. What’s interesting with Legacy is I had a structure. That allowed me to go darker than I’ve ever gone before in my work. The plotting is more muscular. Most of my plays are character explorations: I start with characters and find the story as I go. With Legacy, I had a framework.

[MP] I remember a classmate’s grandfather visiting my elementary school to talk about his experience as a child in the Holocaust. My generation will be the last to have had direct contact with survivors. How will this change our relationship to the Holocaust?

[DG] I, too, as a kid would meet Holocaust survivors and that made it feel very immediate and very present, especially as a young Jewish kid. My kids ask me all the time,  “If Hitler were around, would he want me dead?” and I have to say, “Yes, he would.” But they’re getting that from The Sound of Music. I got that from an actual Holocaust survivor coming into my class. It just becomes more abstract.

[MP] For my grandparents, so much of their Jewish identity involves stories of oppression. I don’t relate to those stories very personally.

[DG] Assimilation has definitely informed and affected Jewish identity after the war, especially in the United States. I think anti-Semitism is actually on the rise, so maybe that will re-ignite a Jewish-outsider status. My generation didn’t experience that, but I don’t know that the next generation won’t.

[MP] The desire to become a parent is so palpable in the play. What part of their experience do Neil and Suzanne want to live on into the future?

[DG] Neil has a healthy, but complicated ego, and I think he wants his intellect, his heft, his depth of knowledge to pass on. Suzanne is someone who believes in our individual potential. Suzanne wanted to experience motherhood and she felt that it was part of the human experience. Neil didn’t. So there’s something slightly more selfish about what he wants his child to be.

[MP] I find the character of Heart, Neil’s grad student, to be so complex and dynamic. She has such a different way of being in the world than Suzanne and Neil. What can they learn from her?

[OB] Suzanne is about to emerge out of her fertile years, Neil feels like he’s about to emerge into the last period of his life, which may or may not include more work. They’re both sitting on the precipice of the end of something. There’s something different about Heart’s generation. We make fun of the millennial disposition, they don’t want to make money, they protest on Wall Street, they debunk all of our assumptions about how the world’s supposed to work, but in reality there is this insane optimism. I think Heart does come off as an alien to Neil and Suzanne because she is part of a generation that is unlike anything they’ve seen before.

[DG] What makes her so desirable and fascinating is her confidence. It’s also her great flaw. She’s not as invincible as she thinks she is. I look at plays I wrote in grad school and they’re mostly a mess, but they’re brave and they’re not self-conscious and there’s something I want to hold onto from those plays—I want to be as brave.